OTTAWA – Justin Trudeau shook up the old boys’ club on Parliament Hill on Wednesday, suspending two Liberal MPs amid allegations that they behaved inappropriately with two of their female New Democrat counterparts.

The Liberal leader booted Newfoundland MP Scott Andrews and Montreal MP Massimo Pacetti from his caucus and called for an independent investigation into accusations of what Trudeau termed “serious personal misconduct.” He also suspended their candidacies for the next election, pending the outcome of the investigation.

The days when such incidents were dealt with quietly in parliamentary backrooms are long over, Trudeau told a news conference.

“Look, folks, it’s 2014. It’s time that this workplace, like other workplaces across the country, had a process whereby these issues can be aired and dealt with,” he said.

“It is extremely important that we make it very clear that as an institution we will protect and encourage people who come forward with serious allegations of this type.”

Both Andrews and Pacetti have denied the allegations. Nothing has been proven against them.

Nevertheless, Trudeau said he had a duty to take “fair but decisive” action after one of the NDP MPs “personally and directly” complained to him on Oct. 28. While he needs to be fair to all concerned, the “benefit of the doubt” must go to the complainants, given how difficult it is for them to come forward, he said.

Trudeau’s swift action was also no doubt influenced by the scandal that has engulfed the CBC for the past two weeks over former radio star Jian Ghomeshi’s alleged conduct with women. The public broadcaster has been criticized for not acting sooner to address Ghomeshi’s alleged behaviour.

Neither the Liberals nor the NDP would reveal the names of the two complainants or even confirm publicly that they are New Democrats. However, NDP insiders said the two were shaken by Trudeau’s decision to make the matter public and fear their names will inevitably leak out.

Insiders say Trudeau first learned of the allegations on Oct. 28 while attending the Hamilton funeral of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, the soldier who was killed at the National War Memorial a week earlier by a gunman who later stormed Parliament Hill.

Trudeau said he immediately directed his party’s whip, Judy Foote, to discuss the matter with her NDP counterpart, Nycole Turmel. Foote and Turmel met on Oct. 30 with the two complainants, who “confirmed the personal misconduct allegations.”

On Wednesday, Foote apprised the Speaker of the House of Commons, Andrew Scheer, of the situation and suggested that a “neutral third party trusted by all concerned” be brought in to investigate.

She asked that the multi-party board of internal economy, which the Speaker chairs, urgently establish a process to investigate the allegations and similar complaints in future. While there is a procedure for Commons employees to lodge complaints, she said there’s no similar process to deal with complaints between members of Parliament.

“Everyone who works in these places has a right to be in a secure work environment, free of harassment. We want to make sure that all parties work on these issues and I think that it’s something that we should do together to show that it is something on which we all agree.”

Andrews, MP for the riding of Avalon in Newfoundland and Labrador, was first elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2011. Until his suspension, he was the Liberal critic for access to information, privacy and ethics.

Pacetti, 52, is a veteran MP who was first elected to the Commons in a byelection in May 2002 in the Montreal riding of Saint-Leonard-Saint-Michel. He was re-elected in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2011.

Both Andrews and Pacetti issued statements denying any wrongdoing and expressing confidence they’ll be cleared by an investigation.

“I believe that our Parliament needs to be a workplace free of harassment, for both staff and MPs,” Andrews said.

OTTAWA — With voter turnout plunging to new lows, Liberal MPs are pondering the idea of legally requiring Canadians to cast ballots in federal elections.

They’re road testing the idea of mandatory voting in a survey emailed to party members, which seeks grassroots input into some of the “new ideas” explored by MPs during their summer caucus retreat last week.

Whether mandatory voting is adopted as part of the eventual Liberal election platform remains to be seen.

“It’s an interesting notion that I think bears some very careful reflection,” Goodale said in an interview.

He stressed that Liberal caucus is, for now, only testing grassroots reaction to the idea. But he also noted that Justin Trudeau has made democratic reform a central pillar of his leadership and that his agenda has been enthusiastically endorsed by party rank and file thus far.

“Justin has indicated he’s open to new ideas, open to new directions if that makes the country stronger,” Goodale said.

Turnout in federal elections has plunged from a high of almost 80 per cent of eligible voters in 1958 to a record low of 58.8 per cent in 2008, according to Elections Canada. It rebounded slightly in 2011 to 61.1 per cent.

A byelection in June in the Alberta riding of Fort McMurray-Athabasca plumbed new depths: just over 15 per cent bothered to vote.

By contrast, turnout in Australia, where voting has been mandatory since 1924, averages about 95 per cent.

The Liberal caucus survey follows an analysis published last spring by one of Trudeau’s senior policy advisers, University of Ottawa academic Robert Asselin, who advocated mandatory voting and the introduction of preferential ballots as ways to re-engage Canadians in the political process.

The survey echoes Asselin’s proposed details for mandatory voting, noting that disenchanted or disinterested voters would still be able to choose “none of the above” and those who failed to cast ballots would receive only a “small fine.”

“I think they’re taking it seriously but it’s something that would be a big shift in our political culture,” Asselin said in an interview of the caucus’ sudden interest in the idea.

He acknowledged that mandatory voting is bound to be controversial and might even prompt a court challenge by electors who believe they have a fundamental right to refuse to cast ballots.

Allowing voters to choose none of the above or to spoil or decline their ballots would preserve electors’ right to refuse to vote, Asselin argued. A $20 fine — Australia imposes such a penalty on those who fail to cast ballots without good reasons — would be largely symbolic and rarely applied, he said.

“I think most people would accept and think it’s a good thing, as a civic duty, to be obliged to vote.”

Should Liberals officially adopt the idea, they would no doubt be denounced by the governing Conservatives, who abolished the mandatory long-form census on the grounds that Canadians should not be forced, under threat of jail time, to divulge private information to a government agency.

However, Goodale said opposition to mandatory voting would fuel suspicions that the Tories are more interested in suppressing votes than they are in improving the health of Canada’s democracy.

He noted that two judges have concluded there was an orchestrated campaign to direct non-Conservative voters to the wrong polling stations during the last election, although only one junior Tory staffer has been found guilty of taking part in such a scheme in Guelph, Ont.

During last year’s Liberal leadership race, Trudeau promoted Asselin’s other proposal for preferential ballots, whereby a voter’s second, third and subsequent choices are counted until one candidate receives more than 50 per cent of the vote.

He was opposed to a more elaborate system of proportional representation (PR), aimed at ensuring a party’s share of the popular vote is more accurately reflected in its share of seats in the House of Commons.

Since then, however, Trudeau has indicated a newfound willingness to at least consider proportional representation. Rank and file Liberals overwhelmingly endorsed a priority caucus resolution at their convention last February, which committed a Liberal government to creating an all-party process to consult on electoral reforms, including preferential ballots and/or PR.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/federal-liberals-ponder-mandatory-voting/feed/13Who’s raised what in the federal fundraising gamehttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-conservative-party-is-still-right-on-the-money-for-now/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-conservative-party-is-still-right-on-the-money-for-now/#commentsThu, 14 Aug 2014 11:01:13 +0000Martin Patriquinhttp://www.macleans.ca/?p=593607Hard work is part of any campaign — but so is cold, hard cash

With the summer burger-flipping season drawing to a close, the leaders of the country’s three main political parties are taking stock of their respective fortunes. The general consensus is this: Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has faltered outside his traditional western base. NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair has been unable to translate his parliamentary prowess into sustained support for his party. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, continues to frustrate both men with his ability to draw media attention—not to mention his Teflon-like ability to recover from his own gaffes.

The governing Tories remain at the top of the fundraising heap, thanks largely to the party’s formidable base in the West. The party raised $4.5 million so far this year, while the Liberals took in $3.7 million. The NDP, meanwhile, raised roughly $2.5 million, but a Maclean’s provincial breakdown of the Elections Canada numbers reveals the Liberals have made significant gains in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. The data does not include donations to party riding associations, only the parties themselves, and is therefore incomplete. Nor does it necessarily include donations under $200, which don’t have to be reported to Elections Canada. Nevertheless, it offers a snapshot of the parties’ financial health as the country heads into an election year. And it suggests the Liberal party is benefitting from Trudeau’s extended honeymoon with the Canadian electorate.

According to the analysis, the Liberal party raised $1.5 million in the vote-rich province of Ontario during the first six months of 2014—about $600,000 more than the Conservative party and more than five times what the NDP raised in the province. The Conservatives had out-raised the Liberals in Ontario as recently as 2013, according to Elections Canada data. Trudeau’s party has also far out-raised the NDP in British Columbia. In this province, long the subject of a tug-of-war between the NDP and the Conservatives, the Liberals harvested $312,000 so far in 2014, about $100,000 shy of the Conservative tally. The NDP, meanwhile, raised just under $130,000.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the fundraising game occurred in Quebec. With 56 MPs, the province is the cradle of NDP support and power. Though Mulcair remains the most popular federal leader in Quebec, the Liberal party raised nearly $340,000 during the time period—far more than the NDP’s $50,000. The spike in donations may be due in part to the Liberal party’s convention, held in Montreal last February. Still, the party’s fundraising numbers are impressive given the Liberal party’s recent scandal-plagued history in the province.

The impetus for the Liberal improvement may have been the Conservative party itself. In 2011, the Tories began to phase out the per-vote subsidy, placing more importance on securing more (often smaller) donations from a larger pool of supporters. The Liberals have focused their efforts: The number of party donors more than doubled between 2010 and 2013, according to Elections Canada data. “[The Conservatives] figured out before us that it was important to spread the base of support,” says senior Liberal fundraiser Christina Topp. “What’s scary is that they continue to out-raise us.”

Indeed, the Conservative party remains the country’s fundraising champ, having raised just over $18 million last year. (The Liberals and the NDP raised $11.3 million and $8.2 million, respectively.) The party also has a robust fundraising system in its various ridings. So far this year, its riding associations across the country transferred about $1.7 million to the party, far more than the Liberal party and the NDP combined.

Strong riding associations allow the Tories to invest in individual candidates without burdening the party’s bottom line. And it is clear who the target of Conservative ire will be in the next election. “Our fundraising results show again that Canadians know we’re better off with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and are choosing his strong, stable leadership over the poor judgment of Justin Trudeau,” Conservative spokesman Cory Hann told Maclean’s.

Not surprisingly, the NDP downplayed the provincial fundraising numbers. “There’s nothing new about the old parties using their well-connected friends and bagmen in the Senate to raise more than us,” said NDP spokesman George Soule. Since 2011 the NDP has been working with U.S. consulting firm 270 Strategies, made up largely of organizers from Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, to modernize the party’s fundraising, strategy and donor outreach programs. “We’re used to being underestimated and working harder, longer and better than the other parties,” Soule says.

Certainly, hard work is part of any campaign—but so is cold, hard cash. In this respect, the Conservatives have an advantage over the two other parties. But thanks to its fundraising effort, and perhaps a bit of Trudeau dazzle, that advantage gets smaller by the day.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-conservative-party-is-still-right-on-the-money-for-now/feed/0Editorial: Justin Trudeau has the potential to be a leaderhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/justin-trudeau-has-the-potential-to-be-an-innovative-leader-but-until-he-demonstrates-a-true-understanding-of-policy-hes-still-just-a-name/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/justin-trudeau-has-the-potential-to-be-an-innovative-leader-but-until-he-demonstrates-a-true-understanding-of-policy-hes-still-just-a-name/#commentsSat, 26 Apr 2014 12:32:08 +0000macleans.cahttp://www.macleans.ca/?p=544257But until he demonstrates a true understanding of policy, he’s still just a name

The Conservatives claim he’s in over his head. But, after a year on the job, pollsters say that if an election were held this week, he’d likely find himself prime minister. True, the actual campaign is a year and a half away, but Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is clearly keeping his head well above water so far.

Since capturing the leadership in a landslide last April, Trudeau has had a beatific effect on his party’s fortunes, including the critical concern of fundraising. In the last three months of 2013, the federal Liberals boasted 44,000 individual donors—outpacing the Conservatives in this regard for the first time in a decade. The ruling Tories may still be the champs in total dollars raised ($9.6 million vs. $4.8 million in the last quarter of 2013, including transfers from riding associations), but the pendulum is beginning to swing in the Liberals’ favour.

The Trudeau effect is even more impressive in the public sphere, where he’s cemented himself in the national media firmament and come to be seen by voters as the unofficial leader of the opposition and potential prime minister. Since Trudeau became leader, the Liberals have led, or been tied, in nearly every national poll, the latest giving them an eight-point advantage over the Harper Conservatives. Poll aggregator Éric Grenier, who blogs at Three Hundred Eight, notes that the last time a majority government found itself trailing in the polls for this long was in the final, convulsive years of the Mulroney regime. And Thomas Mulcair’s official Opposition NDP is nowhere to be seen.

All this to the good, as far as Trudeau is concerned. Yet an unsettlingly large part of his success to date appears to stem from his name, good looks and uncanny knack for the spotlight. Political charisma is certainly a wonderful asset, as the success of the Kennedys or Trudeau’s own father attests to. But to be effective, it must be backed by something a bit more substantial, a point those Conservative attack ads have been making for a year now.

It makes little sense for an opposition party to reveal its full playbook this early in an election cycle. Thus, the modest policy hints Trudeau has provided so far deserve close and careful consideration for what they portend about Canadian politics.

His policy on marijuana—that it should be legalized and regulated—is bold, distinctive and risky, a welcome surprise from an opposition leader so far from an election. Then again, Trudeau is likely just slightly ahead of public opinion on this matter, particularly given recent events in Colorado and Washington state. It also has the beneficial political effect of forcing the Harper government to fall back on its cranky, law-and-order base, while Trudeau presents himself as open-minded and innovative.

His other bold stroke of banning (mostly elderly) Liberal senators from his caucus similarly serves to make him look young and forceful in comparison with Harper, although it does little to solve any of the larger problems with the upper chamber.

In broader policy matters, his comment that “the budget will balance itself” has been seized upon by the Conservatives as evidence that he lacks depth on economic issues. This may be true, but the phrase itself is simply a truism that economic growth will bring any budget into balance if expenditures are held constant. Ronald Reagan repeatedly made this claim in the 1980s. It’s in good company, and hardly a fatal gaffe. Unfortunately, that’s about it for the Trudeau policy binder. He has talked in loving tones about the middle class, supported foreign investment in the oil patch and backed the Keystone XL pipeline.

But all these are motherhood issues for large numbers of Canadians. And he has steadfastly avoided the difficult tangles that come from digging deeper in these policy areas. How exactly will he boost the fortunes of the middle class? And what of the trade-offs inherent in the conflict between resource development and environmental policy?

The lack of sophistication underlying Trudeau’s glibness was revealed in a speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade earlier this month. While giving himself ample credit for backing Keystone during a trip to Washington, Trudeau then claimed, “If Canada had had stronger, more credible environmental policies in place, the Americans would have approved Keystone XL a long time ago.” It is an absurd suggestion that betrays a complete misunderstanding of the American political system. More seasoning on matters of foreign policy is clearly required.

To date, Trudeau has manoeuvred his party into top spot, fixed many internal problems, avoided major missteps and kept himself solidly in the limelight. In other words, he’s proven himself an able politician. The bigger test, however, is yet to come.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/justin-trudeau-has-the-potential-to-be-an-innovative-leader-but-until-he-demonstrates-a-true-understanding-of-policy-hes-still-just-a-name/feed/32Minutes show Mulroney slammed Trudeau over Meech Lakehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/minutes-show-mulroney-slammed-trudeau-over-meech-lake/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/minutes-show-mulroney-slammed-trudeau-over-meech-lake/#commentsSun, 23 Mar 2014 17:17:28 +0000The Canadian Presshttp://www.macleans.ca/?p=528749Minutes obtained by The Canadian Press reveal cabinet meetings from the first half of 1990, when tense Meech Lake drama played out

According to the record of the June 22, 1990, meeting, Mulroney said Meech Lake had been obstructed and undermined by people who thought they had the right to govern forever.

Trudeau had helped sow the seeds of the accord’s eventual destruction, branding it a sellout to the provinces and Mulroney a “weakling.”

The Canadian Press fought for four years to obtain the minutes of cabinet meetings from the first half of 1990, when the tense Meech Lake drama played out.

The Meech accord was intended to meet Quebec’s conditions for embracing the Constitution, patriated in 1982 over the objections of the province’s then-separatist government.

—

The following are excerpts from minutes of meetings of cabinet and the cabinet committee on priorities and planning in the first half of 1990 as the clock ticked down on the ill-fated Meech Lake accord:

— March 7: Then-prime minister Brian Mulroney said he felt the accord would not pass by the June 23 deadline in its present form. He speculated that former Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau “didn’t want Quebec in the Constitution because it would be an admission of failure in 1981,” when Trudeau worked to repatriate the Constitution over the province’s objections.

Mulroney “commented on the irony that, even as the Berlin Wall was coming down, Canadians couldn’t seem to agree ‘even on one paragraph in the Constitution.’”

“The prime minister concluded by saying, ‘I am satisfied that we’re on the right side of history.’”

— April 24: “The prime minister also informed ministers that he had established a Meech Steering Group … to meet every day from now on. This steering group would act like an ‘election campaign headquarters.’ Specifically, it would act as a clearing house for reviewing new intelligence on an hourly and daily basis.”

— April 26: Mulroney declared Meech the government’s “top priority,” predicting “the impact would be enormous” if the accord failed. “Money would flow out of the country and Canada’s prosperity would suffer … The hardship would be, in his view, especially pronounced in Quebec.”

“The prime minister suggested that the situation warranted an election campaign mode of operation … There was a lot of misunderstanding and distrust in Quebec and in English Canada. There was also a lot of ignorance about precisely what was in the Meech Lake accord. Meech Lake had in fact become the symbol of a sellout to Quebec in the minds of some.”

— May 22: “The prime minister concluded the discussion by making the following points: The Meech Lake accord had been a noble initiative which had become sullied in the process of ratification. The five demands originally put by Quebec had become a shopping list for the other provinces and, as a result, the people of Quebec were unlikely to mourn the demise of the accord. Nevertheless, the failure of the accord would have serious consequences for the country and for the government.”

— June 21: Joe Clark, external affairs minister at the time: “There was a deep sense of crisis in Quebec and a need for an agreed government strategy for responding to Quebec should the accord fail. This would mean concentrating on the need to heal Quebec — not on the rest of the country, nor on further constitutional discussions. This would require concrete actions; it would not be good enough to utter soothing words.”

— June 22: Mulroney expressed hope it would be possible to move forward on the constitutional front in due course. “He knew that many of his colleagues were hurting, and he thanked them for their support at a very difficult hour in the nation’s history.”

(Source: Privy Council Office / Cabinet records released under the Access to Information Act)

OTTAWA – Justin Trudeau’s decision to block a candidate who wanted to run for the Liberal party in the coming Trinity-Spadina byelection has been condemned by the riding’s Liberal executive members.

They say the move to block Christine Innes, a two-time failed candidate in the riding and wife of former MP Tony Ianno, was undemocratic and amounted to the leader breaking his promise of open nomination meetings in all ridings.

“There was absolutely no due or fair process … and there was absolutely zero local involvement,” riding president Julia Metus said in a statement Thursday.

“This is contrary to everything the Liberal party — new or otherwise — is supposed to stand for.”

The executive voted at an urgent meeting late Wednesday to condemn the move and request a meeting with Trudeau to review the decision.

Trudeau’s team last week said complaints of bullying and intimidation tactics by Ianno prompted the decision to bar Innes from running for the byelection nomination in Trinity-Spadina and from seeking a nomination in any riding for the 2015 general election.

Trudeau this week defended the move as necessary to demonstrate that party infighting will no longer be tolerated.

However, Innes has denied the allegations of overly aggressive campaigning. She maintains she’s being punished for refusing to rule out challenging Chrystia Freeland, one of Trudeau’s hand-picked star recruits, in a nomination contest for the 2015 election.

In the statement Thursday, the executive backed Innes’ assessment, accusing the party of making “unproven and malicious allegations against the candidate and her family to cover up its desire to control the nomination process.”

Trinity-Spadina and the existing riding of Toronto Centre, which Freeland won in a byelection late last year, will be chopped into three new ridings for the general election, due to redistribution.

Freeland intends to run in the northernmost new riding of University-Rosedale and the party had asked Innes to promise to that she’d seek the nomination in the southernmost new riding of Spadina-Fort York. She refused.

Her campaign team had been preparing for months for a byelection in Trinity-Spadina, which became vacant last week when New Democrat Olivia Chow quit to run for mayor of Toronto. Her team had simultaneously been trying to recruit support for a pro-Innes slate to take control of the University-Rosedale executive.

Complaints lodged by several young Liberals, and obtained by The Canadian Press, specifically singled out Ianno for suggesting they’d have no future in the party if they supported Freeland and questioning Trudeau’s leadership.

Ianno, who was instrumental in organizing a caucus revolt against former prime minister Jean Chretien, was the Liberal MP for Trinity-Spadina from 1993 until he was defeated by Chow in 2006.

To the New York Times, where the Liberal party of Canada is noted for its embrace of American-style politics the American idea of the primary.

Americans adopted primaries to keep party bosses from exerting too much of that control. Primaries were among a series of innovations by turn-of-the-century reformers looking to expand direct democracy, which culminated with the 1913 constitutional amendment to let a state’s voters, instead of state legislatures, elect its senators…

“Debates on the convention floor about these changes often referenced the experience south of the border,” said Katie Telford, the national campaign director of Canada’s Liberal Party, which in 2012 decided to select its new leader through a primary conducted mostly online. The opportunity for citizens to “kick the tires of the party,” according to Ms. Telford, led to unprecedented growth in its ranks of volunteers and small donors. “We were better off,” she said, “having that record-breaking number of volunteers ready to engage with the party.”

This sort of thing makes a lot of sense as an exercise in party and public politics, but, as Dale Smith has noted, this gets complicated in the context of a parliamentary system. Picking a presidential nominee via primaries is comparatively straightforward—the winning candidate does not then become the leader of the Senate or congressional caucuses of the same party, even if there might generally be some expectation that they might be amenable to working together. In the case of our leadership elections, the winning candidate is immediately made leader of the party’s parliamentary caucus, with some degree of power over the MPs (and, if applicable, senators) who belong to that caucus. The line of accountability is thus complicated when the leader derives his mandate not from the people he leads, but from a separate (and larger) body.

Whatever the merit of the arguments for reversing the trend in expanding leadership votes, it is probably too late to turn back now; once you’ve expanded the vote, I suspect it’s difficult to then rein it back. I’m also not entirely convinced that it’s an inherently bad thing for our parliamentary democracy—or, at least, what it achieves in engagement might outweigh what it complicates in accountability. A counterbalancing response might be limiting the amount of power a leader can exert over members of his or her parliamentary caucus.

The next frontier in this regard might involve both primaries and those MPs. The British Conservatives have experimented with primaries at the riding level, allowing a wider vote on the party’s candidates for a few safe seats. In his response to the Reform Act, Liberal blogger Jeff Jedras floated primaries as a better option for riding nominations.

If we want to think bigger, we could move to an Elections Canada-run primary system for nomination races, where every resident of the riding has the option to register as a supporter of a party and vote in only one nomination race, which could all happen at the same time on a pre-determined and known timeline similar to that outlined above, but ran by Elections Canada to ensure transparency and fairness. My concern with this scenario is the dilution of the privileges of party membership, similar to the concerns I expressed when the Liberals debated the issue in the leadership selection context in 2012.

There’s an argument here that such a system, in providing wider mandates, will empower the individual candidate and MP, or at least redirect the line of accountability so that the candidate or MP is less beholden to the party leader.

How could this be applied to the matter of Trinity-Spadina? I suppose you’re still confronted with the idea of candidate vetting, though perhaps an open primary would limit the ability of any riding association to influence the outcome.

“We are here to hope,” he said last Thursday evening, standing in the spotlight before a room packed with supporters. “We are here to work hard. We are here to build. We are here put together the team and the plan to make this country better.”

Shortly thereafter he was done and he was off the stage and off to record an episode of Quebec’s favourite talk show and it was there, in the midst of a discussion about the strife and turmoil of Ukraine, that he decided, badly, to make a hockey joke. “I think President Yanukovych is now illegitimate,” he said in that television studio, “and it is even more worrying now that Russia lost in hockey and will be in a bad mood. We fear some involvement of the Russian government in Ukraine.”

He was, he said, just trying to lighten the mood.

Three days later that video aired and the next morning his joke became a point of outrage to be addressed officially by a minister of the crown, and after a day of a fuss from his rivals and a demand for an apology from the ambassador and some attempt by Liberal MP Marc Garneau to claim that there was nothing to apologize for here and an email to Conservative supporters encouraging them to watch and share the incriminating clip, Mr. Trudeau took to Twitter on Tuesday morning to convey his regrets and shortly thereafter he proceeded to the Ukranian embassy to sign a book of condolences.

So, if nothing else, Mr. Trudeau’s claim to the title of The Most Easily Interesting Man in Canada must remain undisputed (Stephen Harper is quietly interesting, Rob Ford is less interesting than depressing, Justin Bieber is disqualified by residency). But so how should we currently assess his basic state of being, both as a politician and a potential prime minister?

His party’s basic lead in the polls, coinciding perfectly with his election as leader, is now ten months old. For three consecutive quarters, covering the last nine months of 2013, his party has boasted the most donors. In the abstract, even if it would be too much to proclaim him the frontrunner, it would seem fair to surmise that Mr. Trudeau has a somewhat-better-than-decent chance of becoming the 23rd prime minister in this country’s history (and just the 16th to win the office as the direct result of an election). He is an obviously talented individual, whom 42 percent of respondents to a recent poll identified as the best of the potential prime ministers.

The question of his fitness persists. Is he a Serious Person? To what degree should he be taken seriously?

There is that “hopey changey” stuff. To stand today, as a politician, before a packed hall and a dozen cameras and speak the sentence, “We are here to hope” is to dare the ridiculous. And to speak as he does, with those pauses and that pronunciation and that obvious ambition. We are supposed to be far too cynical—sorry, wise—for such stuff these days.

But then, however grudgingly or sparingly or guardedly we are willing to invest, it is hope that they’re all selling hope (even those with wins to claim). It is all down to who sells it best.

If you wish to do so, you could construct a story about this past weekend as an unimpressive showing for Mr. Trudeau. The rehearsal of his Thursday speech was inadvertently broadcast to reporters. The debut of a star endorser, already undermined by a spending controversy, was unnecessarily complicated by a leak that could not be explained and questions that weren’t answered—the resulting fuss overwhelming what was a very good speech. There were no new policy commitments from the leader and his Saturday speech was not perfect—the Nathalie anecdote went nowhere, the middle part dragged and the ending lacked oomph. And then Mr. Trudeau declined to meet reporters at weekend’s end, leading to a mostly unanswered scrum and inciting the usual gnashing of teeth.

And yet. It was an interesting speech and an ambitious speech—perhaps as interesting and ambitious a speech as we will hear all year (and perhaps those are the two adjectives that best describe Mr. Trudeau at this point). And throughout the weekend, there on stage, were the individuals Mr. Trudeau has convinced to stand beside him: the former Commander of the Canadian Army, the regional chief of the BC Assembly of First Nations, the chief of staff to the mayor of Calgary, the chairman of the board of the C.D. Howe Institute, the founding president and CEO of the Business Council of Manitoba, not to mention the former managing editor of the Financial Times and the former Quebec MNA who have already been elected under the Liberal banner since Mr. Trudeau became the party’s leader. Are these people wooed simply by the prospect of winning that Mr. Trudeau currently represents? Even if so, can their involvement be discounted?

And then there is the simple possibility that some significant number of the general population quite likes this Mr. Trudeau and what he has to say and what he seems to represent—at least so far. (Note: A simple conclusion it took me some counsel to appreciate.)

On Tuesday afternoon, he stood in the House to ask the sixth, seventh and eighth questions of the day in a forum in which he has been generally overshadowed and outdone by Thomas Mulcair, a more-obviously “serious” person, but one whose temperament is criticized for different reasons.

“Mr. Speaker, in the last election the Prime Minister’s income splitting commitment was precise,” Mr. Trudeau reported as the Conservatives heckled and yelped in his direction. “It was not some other type of tax cut. It was not some other time. It was income splitting within the current mandate. Did the Prime Minister ever intend to keep his 2011 campaign promise?”

Mr. Harper dodged and then swung back.

“Mr. Speaker, as we have said, we will look at tax reductions for families when we actually have the budget balanced,” he said. “This party on this side understands, unlike him, that the budget does not balance itself.”

The Conservatives laughed. So eager are they to demonstrate Mr. Trudeau’s unseriousness that they are now chasing after even vaguely interesting sentences of his—in this case seemingly undaunted by the prospect of a debate about why and how precisely the budget is being balanced.

Now the Prime Minister stumbled a bit and referred to this weekend’s gathering as an NDP convention before catching himself. “I got confused over the weekend,” he joked.

Mr. Trudeau came back at this. “Mr. Speaker, I am sorry about the Prime Minister’s confusion,” the Liberal leader offered. “It is true, an open convention is something he has never seen.”

The Liberals stood and cheered this one, the Conservatives heckled some more.

Mr. Trudeau proceeded with an entirely reasonable question. “During budget week, the Minister of Finance said that income splitting still required ‘a long hard analytical look,’ ” the Liberal leader recounted. “Why did the Prime Minister not ask the finance minister to conduct this analysis before the election promise was made three years ago?”

Mr. Harper, up smiling, would not let Mr. Trudeau’s mockery go unreturned. “Mr. Speaker,” he quipped, “I do not recall ever having to leave one of my conventions through the back door.”

The Conservatives stood and cheered, delighted with their man’s retort. (Presumably when Mr. Harper avoids engaging with the press gallery he has the decency to walk out the front door.)

Back then to Mr. Trudeau. “Mr. Speaker,” he responded, “I recommend to the Prime Minister that perhaps he try using the front door of the House of Commons and actually talking to people.”

The Conservatives yapped and laughed.

An hour later, after waiting his turn behind the leader of the opposition, Mr. Trudeau strode up to the middle microphone in the House foyer, the one setup before the grand wooden doors of the House. The CBC would broadcast this scrum nationally.

He was asked first about his apology.

“I wanted to make sure that I had the chance to express directly to leaders within the Ukrainian community,” he explained, “including Paul Grod at the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the ambassador himself how seriously the Liberal Party takes the situation in Ukraine and to say that I regret my comments about Russia which made light of some very real fears and concerns that Ukrainians have about Russian intervention.”

He looked contrite and he nodded along as questions were asked and he was pressed further on this and other matters. At one point, a reporter suggested simply that this was not the first time he had placed his foot in his mouth and so perhaps he was lacking somehow in judgment. He explained himself en francais and was then asked to repeat himself in English.

“The Conservatives have decided that they want to make the make election about judgment and I’m actually quite pleased that I will be up against someone who had the judgment to decide that Pat Brazeau, Pam Wallin and Mike Duffy weren’t suitable members of our Senate,” he responded. “I think there’s a lot of questions to be asked, but ultimately what I’ve heard across the country and where I trust Canadians is that Canadians are open to having people who aren’t tightly scripted, who are willing to talk like people talk and from time to time take risks and from time to time have to apologize or withdraw their comments. I’m confident that my values, my approach and my openness with Canadians is exactly what people from across the country are looking for in their representatives in Ottawa.”

So from time to time he will say something for which he will have to apologize. And that will be the price of change. Or that will be part of why Mr. Trudeau never becomes prime minister. Or that will be what has to change for him to become prime minister.

How do Canadians feel about service cuts at Canada Post? Depends on how they receive their mail now—and evidently, how they vote.

An Angus Reid Global poll released today found that 58 per cent of respondents disapprove of changes that, among other things, would see door-to-door service eliminated for the one-third of customers lucky enough to still get it (full results and methodology can be found here). Overall, we appear rueful about these reforms to a national institution. Drill down, though, and you get some telling results:

• More than half of Conservative voters, 53 per cent, support the end of door-to-door in urban areas, while less than a third of Liberal and NDP supporters do.

• Fully 59 per cent of respondents who already pick up their mail at community mailboxes support the changes. I’ll be the cynic and suggest that these two findings are not unrelated: the Tories are strongest in suburban and rural ridings. Suburban and rural residents aren’t losing much from the end of door-to-door. You don’t suppose the government-appointed bosses at Canada Post took that into account when they hatched this plan, do you?

• Only 48 per cent of those polled consider Canada Post to be an “essential service” and even these believers aren’t using it much; 72 per cent said they send mail less often than four times a month. Two in five do so less than once a month.

• Men seem a lot less worried about mail service than women. Of the 17 per cent of respondents who said they were unaffected and unconcerned by the changes, fully 73 per cent were men. Nearly six in 10 who consider Canada Post an essential service are women. These findings should not surprise guys like me, who haven’t sent a birthday card since the Chrétien years.

• Some 38 per cent of respondents said Canada Post should be privatized, which strikes me as a lot.

In short, even a lot of those angry about the reforms aren’t using the mail enough to make this a ballot-box question in the next federal election. Those affected probably aren’t living in Tory-held ridings, meaning the moves are unlikely to cost the Harper government seats. As Shachi Kurl, vice-president of Angus Reid Global, put it: “These changes appear to give Prime Minister Stephen Harper less trouble with his base.”

All very revealing—though you have to think the political implications were well understood before the first letter of the plan was written.

Stephen Harper looked ever so relaxed, standing among friends, as he spoke to thousands assembled for a glitzy annual gala at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on Dec. 1. He strode across the stage in an untucked black shirt and slacks, a wardrobe giveaway that he would perform with Herringbone, the Harper-led musical act that informally serves as the Conservative party’s house band. Harper spoke for several minutes without notes—a relative rarity for the Prime Minister—and the crowd reciprocated with an immediate, and prolonged, standing ovation. Then, the Prime Minister played a few tunes. The warmth in the room was palpable as the Jewish National Fund feted Harper at its Negev Dinner, as thanks for his long-standing and unapologetic defence of the Israeli cause.

Conservatives won the support of 52 per cent of Jewish voters during the last federal election, a departure from prior elections stretching back for decades. Conservative politicians have coalesced behind the Prime Minister, and now stand in lockstep with his stridently pro-Israel agenda. Tim Hudak, Ontario’s Opposition leader, leapt to his feet when Harper announced that he would visit the Middle East in 2014. Julian Fantino, the veterans affairs minister, beamed as the Prime Minister belted out the words to the Who’s restless hit, The Seeker. Karen Stintz, a Toronto mayoral candidate set to take on Ford Nation, soaked in the festivities. Harper, who almost never pours his heart out in public, acknowledged that the affair was “a show of affection and love,” and assured the crowd the feeling was mutual. The people behind the gala made one thing clear: No longer are Jews nervous about voting Conservative.

That wasn’t always so. Liberals used to be able to count on waves of Jewish support at the polls, and they benefited from the perception among Jews that extremists in the Conservative ranks were not to be trusted. But there was no strict ideological opposition to right-leaning parties, says Shimon Fogel, the CEO of the Centre for Jewish and Israel Affairs. He says the last Conservative prime minister was held in similarly high regard. “There was significant affection for, and appreciation directed at, Brian Mulroney,” says Fogel. “It didn’t translate uniformly to the party that he represented.” The emergence of the Reform movement, and the Canadian Alliance that followed, only spooked wary Jewish voters. Frank Dimant, the CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, recalls that Israeli officials, long accustomed to their Liberal counterparts in Ottawa, were “very skeptical” of the fractured right wing. But then, in 2004, along came Harper and the united right.

Dimant’s first encounter with Harper wasn’t altogether warm, he says. In fact, it was “a little bit cool.” When the Jewish leader asked the then-opposition leader if he’d continue a tradition of booting anti-Semites from caucus—an agreement B’nai Brith arranged with prior Reform and Alliance leaders—Harper inquired sharply about whether or not Jewish leaders had sought the same assurances from the Liberals. “That floored all of us, quite frankly,” says Dimant. But don’t mistake that for disillusionment on Dimant’s part. “I’ve seen him many times over the years, privately and with delegations, and have found him to be forthright,” he says.

Eventually, Harper’s approach connected with the broader Jewish community. “Jews started to realize that they finally had a leader who felt the same way about their issues as our community,” says Sen. Linda Frum, whom Harper appointed to the Senate in 2009. “I think Jews had been Liberals because they figured they would get the most sensitivity for their perspective. But I think they’ve figured out, slowly, that this was an illusion.” Frum insists the community simply grew tired of Liberal abstentions at the United Nations and the notion that, when Israelis and Palestinians quarrel, Canada should “consider the grievances of both sides equally.” When Harper infuriated Israel’s critics by declaring the country’s 2006 rocket attacks on Hezbollah a “measured response,” Jews loved what they heard. The friendship was sealed.

Those remarks, and similarly friendly comments that have helped define Harper’s foreign policy, may have emboldened his opposition at home—but they also assured him of thousands of new friends. Dimant recalls the reception that Harper received at a 2006 event where he wasn’t even the guest of honour. Walter Arbib, a Jewish-Canadian philanthropist, was supposed to gather all the accolades—but everyone wanted to talk to the Prime Minister. “He couldn’t eat his meal because people didn’t stop coming over to shake his hand,” says Dimant. And, if any Israelis clung to any doubts about their new Conservative friends, those have long since vanished. “I think it’s fair to say that he’s the most popular politician in Israel, bar none, including any of their own. He’s a rock star in Israel,” says Frum, adding that Israelis are “thrilled” that a new visitor’s centre at an environmentally sensitive bird sanctuary, built partially with the $5.7 million raised at Harper’s Toronto tribute, will bear the Prime Minister’s name. “The fact that they’ve chosen to associate it with Stephen Harper’s name is as meaningful a tribute as I think Israel can offer,” says Fogel.

The political advantage in Canada to such a pro-Israel stance is unclear. “Going after the Jewish vote is not great political strategy,” says Frum. “I think it’s almost a disadvantage,” says Dimant. A handful of ridings, including key constituencies in Toronto and Montreal, can be tilted by Jewish support. But that’s about it, in stark electoral terms. Frum says the polls are not what drives Harper’s support for Israel. “These are his genuine, and true, and deeply held convictions, and he feels he has no choice,” she says. “He’s not going to take a different position because it’s politically advantageous.” Indeed, the Prime Minister told the gala audience in Toronto that his affection for Israel comes not from political ambition, but rather his father’s own fervent belief in the then-fledgling nation.

Nevertheless, Liberals want to win back the Jewish vote they counted on for so long. Justin Trudeau, the Liberal leader, recently reiterated his party’s position that Canada “must always be a strong, true friend of Israel.” His chief fundraiser, Stephen Bronfman, claimed Trudeau was a closer friend to Israel than the Prime Minister, because he’s actually visited the place. That advantage evaporates next year, when Harper sets off for Israel, especially because, Dimant claims, the trip’s not a token drop-in. “I think it’s going to be both a political journey to Israel, but also a spiritual journey,” he says.

As he accepted his Toronto tribute, Harper referred to the countries surrounding Israel as a “region of darkness,” juxtaposed against a Jewish state that he called a “light of freedom and democracy.” Canadians may disagree about the substance of that characterization, but everyone can agree about one thing: On matters of Israel, the Prime Minister is utterly immovable.

My colleague Stephen Gordon challenges the notion championed by Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau that Canada’s middle class is facing hard times. Gordon correctly points out that total income, measured at the family level, has seen some growth over the last twenty years. Look at the data another way, though, and you’ll see more troubling evidence.

The chart below lays out median annual earnings — adjusted for inflation — over the last 35 years. The data show that, for males, median earnings started at $43,500 in 1976 and have progressed downward since. The economic booms of the late 1990s and mid-2000s failed to move the needle for middle class men. The pattern for female earnings, on the other hand, is quite different. Since women on average work fewer hours for lower wages than males, overall female earnings are lower than for males. However, female earnings have followed a clear upward trend over the past three decades, which reflects both more participation in paid work by women and growing wages.

Canada, median male and female earnings. Source: Statistics Canada.

These data suggest that the growth in middle family incomes is not widely-based. To continue the past decade’s family-level income growth, women would have to work still more hours and the occupations where women predominate would need to show continued wage growth. Neither is assured.

What’s gone wrong with the job market for men? Across rich countries, jobs featuring routine tasks — like assembly line worker or accounting clerk — have declined, while the number of cognitive, non-routine, and personal service jobs — think: health worker, or interior designer — has increased. The net result of these changes is a hollowing out of the labour market that has hit males hardest. Evidence of this is mostabundant for the U.S., but Canadiantrends appear quite similar in many respects. This job polarization seems to be related to global developments like technological change, trade patterns, as well as institutional factors such as the decline of unionization.

In my view, a society where big slices of the population don’t benefit from economic growth invites trouble. Some worry about fairness, and the implications of the concentration of economic power. But even if all you care about is an overall growing economy, stagnating middle incomes can be a problem in a democracy. Take the case of the B.C.’s rejection of the HST. A poll of British Columbians taken around the time of the 2011 referendum revealed that most respondents believed the HST to be a growth-enhancing tax structure, but they didn’t think the benefits of that growth would accrue to them. In order to maintain support for economic measures that grow the economy, the beneficial effects of growth need to be widely felt.

What can we do about this? There are three policy options: We can tax, fight, or adapt.

The first option is to harness the tax system to counteract labour market stagnation. Why not let the market determine wages and then redistribute some of those earnings around with the tax system? The problem here is the math — the number of people in the middle is too large to be paid out of revenues from higher taxes at the top. A six per cent increase to the top federal income tax bracket, for example, might bring in $1 or $2 billion per year — not nearly enough to compensate millions of middle-earners with stagnating wages.

The second potential solution is to fight the global changes affecting wages. We could try to hold back international trade and technological advance; freeze the economy in place by preserving jobs in existing industries. With this solution, we lose the great benefits that flow from international trade (a greater variety of cheaper goods) and the dynamism that comes from new technologies. Even if it were possible to halt change, we would simply lock in stagnation.

The third choice is to adapt to the world we have. Rather than striving to ossify our economy in some idealized previous condition, we embrace and adapt to the global changes we are seeing. We can build the labour force that is needed now and prepare for the one needed in the future. Demand for cognitive, non-routine, personal service, and creative labour remains high. A still-more educated workforce gives the next generation of Canadians the best chance at carving out their own well-paying niche. We can ensure our tax system encourages and rewards entrepreneurship and innovation so that new high-paying jobs continue to be created here.

Quick or easy fixes are elusive. Instead, the best approach is to focus on long-run structural measures — like education — that can build a sustainable framework for broadly-based income growth for the future.

OTTAWA – Conservative attack ads against Justin Trudeau have turned into a financial boon for the Liberal party.

The party raised $336,000 in the 48 hours following Trudeau’s landslide victory in the Liberal leadership race Sunday.

Officials say that’s more than double the party’s previous top haul for an e-mail fundraising campaign.

They say the donations poured in after two back-to-back mass email solicitations that urged Liberals to fight back against Conservative attacks.

The first, sent out just as Trudeau was leaving the stage Sunday after delivering his acceptance speech, urged Liberals not to let the coming barrage of “negative and misleading attacks” drown out the new leader’s “positive message of change.”

The second was issued Monday evening — shortly after the Conservatives launched three television ads featuring video from 2011 of Trudeau doing a mock strip-tease for a charity event.

The Tory ads, set to carnival music and voiced in a mocking tone, assert that the new Liberal leader has neither the experience nor judgment to be prime minister and conclude with the tag line: “Justin Trudeau. He’s in way over his head.”

Trudeau has vowed to remain positive and not to respond in kind to negative attacks, of which he believes Canadians are heartily fed up.

Response to the email solicitations, sent out under his name, suggests he may be right.

“The Conservatives are already back in the gutter,” he said in the Monday evening email blast.

“Now they’re using pictures from a charity fashion show to attack me and undermine what we’ve built … They’ve seen what we can do and they’re desperately trying to drown us out with the childish, food-fight politics.”

The email also urged people to donate to the Canadian Liver Foundation, the charity for which Trudeau stripped off his jacket, tie and shirt at a fundraising gala in 2011.

The foundation reports it has received almost $10,000 in donations over the past two days — more than twice what it normally receives in unsolicited donations in a month.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/tory-attack-ads-fuel-donations-to-liberal-party/feed/4Trudeau leads first caucus meeting: ‘We have an awful lot of work to do’http://www.macleans.ca/general/trudeau-leads-first-caucus-meeting-we-have-an-awful-lot-of-work-to-do/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/trudeau-leads-first-caucus-meeting-we-have-an-awful-lot-of-work-to-do/#commentsWed, 17 Apr 2013 16:38:58 +0000The Canadian Presshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=372990OTTAWA – Justin Trudeau presided over his first caucus meeting as Liberal leader Wednesday by harking back to the party’s signature accomplishment when his father was at the helm.
Trudeau…

OTTAWA – Justin Trudeau presided over his first caucus meeting as Liberal leader Wednesday by harking back to the party’s signature accomplishment when his father was at the helm.

Trudeau said it’s “extraordinarily fitting” that Wednesday’s meeting should occur on the same “auspicious” day that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was adopted 31 years ago — a seminal addition to the Constitution when it was patriated in 1982 by Pierre Trudeau.

“We celebrate today, as Liberals, the document that makes sure that Canadians enjoy freedoms that can never be taken away,” he told Liberal MPs and senators.

In an era when parties are elbowing each other for room at the centre of the political spectrum, Trudeau asserted that the charter is what distinguishes Liberals from the Conservatives and NDP.

“(The charter) is at the centre of what it means to be a Liberal,” he said.

“Conservatives talk a good game about being a party of freedom but they are mistrustful of the mechanisms that actually ensure those freedoms for Canadians and that’s why they don’t celebrate the charter.”

The Harper government issued a perfunctory press release last year to mark the 30th anniversary of the charter, in stark contrast to the year-long, government-sponsored festivities to mark the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812.

New Democrats supported patriation of the Constitution with a charter of rights back in 1982. But Trudeau asserted that the NDP finds itself “deeply conflicted” today.

“(That’s) largely because of a political calculation they’ve made, pandering to a tremendous number of very vocal sovereigntist Quebecers who do not particularly appreciate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

The Constitution was patriated over the objections of Quebec’s separatist government of the day and has been a sore point ever since with many Quebecers.

Nevertheless, Trudeau said no document is more broadly supported “by all Canadians, including the vast majority of Quebecers” than the charter.

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair called Trudeau’s assertion “completely false.”

“There has never been the slightest hesitation with regard to the importance of the charter, for the rights that it protects for all Canadians,” Mulcair said.

The NDP, which swept Quebec in the 2011 election, is committed to creating “winning conditions for Quebec within Canada,” he said, adding that it’s unacceptable that “one of the key founding provinces … should be excluded from the Constitution.”

Trudeau, elected by a landslide Sunday to the Liberal helm, was welcomed to caucus as the conquering hero by Liberal MPs, senators and staffers. They crammed into the tiny room in the bowels of Parliament’s Centre Block where the party has been relegated since being reduced to a third-party rump in the 2011 election.

Trudeau predicted the party has “not just a glorious past but a glorious future.” Still, he soberly told the assembled Grits: “We have an awful lot of work to do.”

This afternoon, Liberal supporters filled a hall in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The six people who hope to win the party’s leadership made their final appeals to party faithful in a series of 30-minute showcases. Maclean’s has everything you need to know about what comes next for the party that hopes to rebuild its former glory.

John Geddes and Paul Wells, in the video to the right, wonder how much frontrunner Justin Trudeau has actually been tested during his leadership run.

On Dec. 25 expect to find Labour Minister Lisa Raitt in the movie theatre watching Les Misérables. She is a huge fan, having seen the musical twice in London and twice in Toronto. The song I Dreamed a Dream, she confessed, makes her cry every time—but only in the context of the play. That means no tears were shed for Susan Boyle, the underdog who sang it famously on Britain’s Got Talent. Raitt has told her partner Bruce Wood that advance Les Misérables movie tickets “better be under the Christmas tree.”

Someone is posing

It was a rare moment of cross-partisanship on the Hill, with politicians from opposite sides coming together for a photo op. But there’s no shared version of events as to how that photo came about. Liberal leadership candidateJustin Trudeau told Capital Diary that Tory MP Eve Adams was hosting a group of visitors, including one from her home city of Mississauga, Ont., and asked him if he would pose for a picture with them. They went to the House foyer for better lighting. Adams, however, says it was Trudeau who asked her group if they wanted a picture, though she did join in for the snap. Trudeau says opposition MPs asking him to pose with people, even constituents, “happens all the time.”

Senate reform, at last

The internal Senate TV channel—which only provides live audio, not visuals from the Red Chamber—used to just have a red screen that had the date with a note that the Senate was sitting. Now it actually says who is talking, with a caption on what they are talking about, and has rotating still images of Senate scenes. Liberal Senate staffer Christian Dicks says it’s made it much easier to follow. Before, if you didn’t catch the name of who was talking, you had to listen carefully and guess at who was speaking and the context.

Liberal party crasher

The Liberal Christmas party had some disgruntled staffers upset over the price of bottles of wine for a table. So upset, in fact, that some of them looked up the options online and snuck in the same bottles into the packed event. The least expensive wine was $51; they snuck in an LCBO version for $8.98. A surprise guest at the Liberal holiday bash was Bruce Hyer, who left the NDP in April 2012, and currently sits as an Independent. Liberal leadership candidate Joyce Murray said Hyer was her date for the night. Other Liberal leadership candidates included Martha Hall Findlay, whose table was furthest from the stage, but on the upside was close to one of the bars. At the beginning of the night Howard Liebman, aide to Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, came to the event carrying around a large box filled with holiday cards his boss still had to sign.

Liberal horsing around

During the recent voting marathon, Liberal MP Mark Eyking got an emergency video sent to his BlackBerry. His wife Pam Eyking wanted to show him that their 10-year-old mare named Wonder had gotten past a fence on their farm and was now eating the grass on their front lawn. Milder weather meant the grass had grown longer. Eyking told his wife to just let the horse be. “Now I don’t have to go home and mow the lawn,” he quipped to Capital Diary.

MP has her sister’s back

This Christmas holiday, Ontario Conservative MP Kellie Leitch is off to Edmonton. Her sister is pregnant and she wants to be by her side. If the birth goes smoothly, she will be in the waiting room. If her sister needs a C-section, Leitch plans on being in the operating room, since she is also a surgeon. She says being in the room is okay as long as she is not the primary doctor doing the procedure.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/capital-diary-8/feed/0Parliamentarian of the year, 2011: Bob Raehttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/parliamentarian-of-the-year-2011-bob-rae/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/parliamentarian-of-the-year-2011-bob-rae/#commentsTue, 20 Nov 2012 06:12:25 +0000macleans.cahttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=316474He may be the leader of the third party, but everything goes quiet when he rises to speak

Shortly after Bob Rae was first elected in 1978, John Diefenbaker, the former prime minister who remained a MP until his death in 1979 at the age of 83, imparted two pieces of advice: “Don’t take any s–t from anybody,” and “Go for the throat every time.”

These might be words to live by, but Rae looked elsewhere for inspiration—to Allan MacEachen, the legendary Liberal, and Tommy Douglas, the patron saint of the NDP. MacEachen was a commanding presence who taught Rae you couldn’t be yelling all the time, that you had to have “more than one gear.” Douglas was disciplined and practical. He cracked jokes and didn’t hold grudges. And it was Douglas who told him to eschew notes when speaking in the House. “Because as soon as you start to do it, he says, you lose all the spontaneity and all the effect,” Rae recalls.

Here are the makings of a master of the House.

Rae doesn’t so much speak as hold forth. The leader of the third party, one with interim in his title at that, he could easily be ignored, relegated to a footnote in the major debates of the day between the government and the official Opposition. He might, at the very least, strain noticeably and unflatteringly for everyone’s attention. But no one holds the attention of this 41st Parliament like Bob Rae. “The House is a raucous place and it doesn’t give much quarter,” says Ralph Goodale, the Liberal deputy leader, “but when Bob gets to his feet, people listen.”

It owes something to a different time. When he asked his first question in the House it was of finance minister Jean Chrétien. When he stood to deliver his maiden speech, he heard heckles from Ray Hnatyshyn and Lincoln Alexander, a future governor general of Canada and a future lieutenant general of Ontario respectively. He moved the motion that brought down Joe Clark’s government and watched as Pierre Trudeau debated the Constitution. The proceedings had only just begun to be televised when he first arrived. The House didn’t seem then to be so ritualistically antagonistic. Discipline of message was not the dominating force it is now.

He is a link to this past. A throwback, even. But he is not yesterday’s man. He is the man entrusted to keeping the Liberal flame. And he is Stephen Harper’s toughest test each afternoon. Witness that day last month when Rae led a reasoned, even heartfelt, debate on suicide prevention—a rare moment of enlightenment in a brutal fall sitting. “I still have this, maybe naive, but I don’t think it is, this notion,” Rae says, “that the House should be a place where big ideas are shared and people are listening to each other and trying to make progress.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/parliamentarian-of-the-year-2011-bob-rae/feed/0A centrist party that has lost its centrehttp://www.macleans.ca/general/a-centrist-party-that-has-lost-its-centre/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/a-centrist-party-that-has-lost-its-centre/#commentsFri, 19 Oct 2012 09:00:01 +0000Paul Wellshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=304273Paul Wells on Dalton McGuinty stepping down and the Liberal party's climb ahead

Dalton McGuinty remains such a gifted political performer that when Ontario’s premier announced his retirement from politics, throat catching, eyes misting, it was easy to forget the context.

The context is that two recent polls put his Ontario Liberal party in third place, about 15 points behind the opposition NDP and Conservatives. McGuinty’s energy minister, Chris Bentley, stands accused by opposition MPPs of being in contempt of the legislature over an apparent failure to disclose all of the reasoning behind the cancellation of two gas-fired energy plants. There was talk of adding McGuinty and the government house leader to the list of Liberals facing contempt motions.

McGuinty won three elections in a row, but with less of a pop every time. To say the least, he had no guarantee of winning the next. It is a familiar trajectory for Liberals in Canada these days. The question is whether it can be reversed.

Let us get the good news for Canada’s assorted Liberal parties out of the way quickly. Today, parties carrying the Liberal name continue to govern in Canada’s largest and third-largest provinces by population, Ontario and British Columbia, as well as the smallest, Prince Edward Island.

Okay, we’re done with the good news. Liberals in Ontario and B.C. could hardly have a more tenuous hold on power. Both have been down in the polls so long that it looks like up to them. B.C. Premier Christy Clark speculates now and then about jettisoning her party’s name, which is a bit confusing anyway because the B.C. Liberals are a centre-right coalition that little resembles the federal party.

Liberals do form the official opposition in Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. But given the steady drumbeat of salacious revelations from a commission of inquiry about the financing of Jean Charest’s former government in Quebec, it is unlikely the Liberals would do as well today as they did in September’s election.

Liberal parties are in third place in Alberta, Manitoba and the Yukon, the only territory where members of the legislature have party affiliations. In Saskatchewan in the last election the provincial Liberals didn’t even win one vote in 100.

In federal politics, the Liberals have lost seats and vote share in each of the last four elections. If they lose much more support they will start to owe votes to the other parties.

The federal Liberals’ problems began long before the current slump, Carleton University journalism prof Paul Adams argues in his new book Power Trap. “Arguably the Liberal party has been in decline since the 1950s,” he writes, “and there has been no ‘natural governing party’ since.” The federal Liberals have had no real presence in the Prairie West in a half-century. They have not won a majority of Quebec seats since 1980. Since 2004, when a united Conservative party put an end to the vote-splitting that produced a decade-long near-monopoly of Liberal seats in Ontario, the Liberals have lost another bucket of Ontario seats each time they went to bat.

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives reliably depict the Liberals as high-taxing statists who cannot imagine leaving a dollar in your pocket when they could spend it on daycare or a fancy census instead. Intriguingly, Adams argues nearly the opposite: that the Liberals’ long-standing “progressive impulses” were “quietly muted in a largely collaborative project” between Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin during the almost nine years Martin served in Chrétien’s cabinet.

The Liberals’ 1993 Red Book included promises to renegotiate NAFTA, to boost immigration levels and to create 50,000 daycare spaces. None was implemented. To Adams (whose book argues, probably in vain, for a Liberal-NDP merger), the result was that the Liberals blew their credibility as defenders of activist government.

“As you stare at the wreckage of what was arguably the most successful party in the history of the democratic world, there are various explanations for its utter demagnetization in 2011,” Adams writes. “Some of them were very long-term. But one of them, surely, must have been its wilful refusal to differentiate its policies from those of the Conservatives.”

Well, which is it? Are the Liberals incurable tax-and-spenders or are they a pale copy of the Conservatives? In the jurisdictions where Liberal disease is most advanced—Saskatchewan and Manitoba for many years, and increasingly now at the federal level—it’s both. The great danger for a centrist party is that it will forget how to argue persuasively for a centre.

None of these trends is necessarily irreversible. Canadian political history rarely moves in straight lines for long. But the decline of Liberal parties across most of the West, Liberal-branded crises in all of the three largest provinces and the federal party’s enduring slump all suggest a robust trend.

When they get in a tight spot, Liberals like to present themselves as the only moderate solution in a field of radicals. Justin Trudeau did it again when he announced his leadership candidacy. It is a spiel that reflects Liberals’ enduring wish for an imaginary fight that would be easy to win instead of the one they’re in. In fact, Liberals’ problems would vanish if the other parties would oblige them by behaving as ideologues. Conservative and social-democratic parties have sharply moderated their messages. There is no longer anything the NDP wants to nationalize, and the party likes to brag that it has delivered more balanced budgets where it has formed governments than Liberals have. Meanwhile, Stephen Harper repeatedly votes against his own backbenchers when they propose measures that would reopen the abortion debate. If Harper and Tom Mulcair were wild-eyed freaks, there would be acres of room for a centrist party. They aren’t, so there isn’t.

In fact, if the country’s assorted Liberal parties are in the mood for advice from the “department of easier said than done,” they should waste no more time seeking to present themselves as the middle ground between extremes. Instead they should find some extreme worth defending. What social end is so important that it’s worth taxing to achieve? What fights are worth fighting?

The decline of Liberal parties in Canada produces a kind of optical illusion. The centre isn’t disappearing, it is becoming crowded. Nothing about the Liberal name ensures the endurance of Liberal parties. Loyalty will not save them. Wit and heart will, or nothing will.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/a-centrist-party-that-has-lost-its-centre/feed/42Justin Trudeau on his own termshttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/on-his-terms/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/on-his-terms/#commentsThu, 11 Oct 2012 15:25:01 +0000Jonathon Gatehousehttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=299647He's the most popular politician in Canada—and not just because of his last name

Justin Trudeau lets the question hang in the air for long seconds before he exhales heavily and begins to answer. It can’t have taken him by surprise, but it’s not the sort of thing one wants to appear to be too cavalier, or God forbid, eager about. Why does he want to be prime minister?

The words are slow and deliberate at first, then gradually pick up steam. He touches on the deaths of his youngest brother and his father, more than a decade ago, and how the public outpourings of sympathy reinforced his already unique relationship with Canadians. He speaks of his own children, Xavier, 5, and Ella, 3, and his conflicting desires to spend more time with them, yet enhance their future. There’s a nod to the last few months of deliberation and doubt. He’s forthright enough to admit that the timing isn’t ideal—in a perfect world he’d have more Parliamentary experience, maybe even a stint in cabinet under his belt. But the opportunity to become leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, and thereby start auditioning for an even bigger job, is presenting itself now. And for better or for worse, he feels like it’s his destiny.

“Can I actually make a difference? Can I get people to believe in politics once again? Can I get people to accept more complex answers to complex questions? I know I can. I know that’s what I do very well. Why am I doing this? Because I can, not because I want to. Because I must.” His voice drops to a whisper on the final word. The bells at the church across the road from the café where we’re sitting in his Montreal riding are tolling the noon hour. It’s all gotten a bit dramatic. He catches himself and laughs. “I wish there was a simple, easy answer, but there’s a lot of factors. I guess it comes down to that I love this country, and I think I can do better than what we are currently getting from our politicians.”

It’s still two days before the official kickoff of his leadership campaign, but his ambitions are no longer a secret. Some carefully scripted leaks to the CBC and La Pressehave set off an orgy of speculative coverage and cranky opinion pieces. Will the 40-year-old with the fantastic hair, piercing eyes and same crooked smile as Pierre replicate the Trudeaumania that carried his dad to 24 Sussex Dr. back in 1968, three years before he was born? Should anyone even bother to run against such a media darling? Why doesn’t he have a clear position on IMF bailouts or the F-35 fighter jet?

As he spoons up the thick remainders of his second hot chocolate of the session, constituents from his riding of Papineau—a poor, immigrant-heavy and overwhelmingly francophone slice of Montreal’s north end—stop by the table to wish him well. “You sent me a card for my birthday. You were the only one,” says one man. “You’ve got my support.” (Trudeau explains he sends such greetings to everyone in the riding, all of them handwritten.) When he first stood for election here as a rookie candidate in 2008 against a popular Bloc Québécois incumbent, few gave him a chance. The family name was better suited to monied turf like nearby Outremont, or the anglo bastion of Mont Royal—his father’s former stomping grounds—went the theory. But Trudeau campaigned like hell and pulled off a 1,200-vote upset. Then in 2011 he did it again, pushing his margin of victory to more than 4,300 ballots in a general election that saw Liberal support in Quebec—and the rest of the country—fall to a historic low. To date, the two Papineau campaigns have been his biggest political successes. And he’s fiercely proud of the victories—a refutation, he says of the widely held perception that he has somehow always had it easy. “I’m willing to work extremely hard. The idea that my father raised sons that expected anything to be handed to them, to not roll up their sleeves and work harder than anyone around them, is to not know my dad.” An elderly grey-haired woman interrupts, rapping insistently on the café window until she captures his attention, and extracts a smile and a wave.

The resumé is undeniably thin for someone seeking this country’s highest office. He holds a B.A. in English from McGill, and a bachelor of education from the University of British Columbia. For a time, he taught at two different Vancouver-area private schools—primarily as a math and English instructor, he is quick to point out, not drama as the press likes to make it out. (He took over a theatre class when a fellow teacher quit halfway through the year.) That was followed by stints studying engineering at the Université de Montréal, then environmental geography at McGill, although neither degree was completed. After the death of his brother Michel in a 1998 avalanche, he became a high-profile campaigner for winter-sport safety. He later chaired Katimavik, a national youth volunteer organization that was founded by one of his father’s best friends, and was euthanized this past spring by the Conservative government. And he once hosted the Giller Prize gala. For the last four years, he’s been an opposition MP, serving as the Liberals’ critic for youth, post-secondary education and amateur sport.

But to focus on what he’s not is to lose sight of what Justin Trudeau undeniably is: the most popular politician in all of Canada. A passionate orator and effective advocate for all sorts of causes. The kind of boldface name who can draw packed crowds to Liberal fundraisers anywhere in the country, whether it’s a barbeque in Windsor, Ont., university pub nights in Vancouver, or even a Stampede breakfast in hostile Calgary. A ubiquitous media presence at events as diverse as the premier of Deepa Mehta’s film Midnight’s Children at the Toronto International Film Festival, and a We Day rally for high schoolers at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto. The kind of subject that sells magazines and newspapers.

Ever since he entered federal politics, polls have suggested that his personal popularity far outstrips that of his party or its leaders. One of the latest, for the Toronto Star this past June, found the Liberals would instantly vault from a distant third behind the NDP and the Tories, at 19 per cent, to first place, with 42 per cent, should he take over the reins.

With all the attention and adulation, it wouldn’t be hard to develop a messiah complex. But already “the son of,” he has been careful to guard against such delusions. When Michael Ignatieff stepped down as leader after the debacle of the last election, and Bob Rae was chosen as his interim replacement, Trudeau informed caucus colleagues that he had no desire for the top job. Privately he was considering giving up his seat and returning to teaching. “The last thing the party needed was another quick fix in leadership and that’s what a lot of people were turning to me for,” says Trudeau. “ ‘You know what? We made the wrong choice in the last ones, but this one will be fine, this one will save us.’ I was terrified that if I even hinted I wanted to do it that would remove the pressure on the party to actually change and do the kind of work it needs to do to regain the confidence of Canadians.”

It wasn’t a lack of desire—the idea of an eventual leadership bid had been part of the calculation when he entered politics. But he had figured that both he and Canadians would have more time to find comfort with the concept. As pressure built from within the party, he started re-evaluating his position last Christmas, seeking the opinions of friends and family. In June, he instructed Gerry Butts, a confidant since their McGill days and a former principal secretary to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, and Katie Telford, another ex-McGuinty adviser, to start assembling a campaign team, just in case. He spent the summer ruminating—although to outsiders the cross-country blitz of party events seemed almost indistinguishable from campaigning. A decision was finally reached in mid-August.

Trudeau could have announced back then, or when Parliament returned on Sept. 17, but he says it took longer to organize his team and tour events (he’s hitting Vancouver, Calgary and Mississauga, Ont., over the first three days) than anticipated. So the chosen date became Oct. 2, four days after the 12th anniversary of his father’s death, and what would have been Michel’s 37th birthday. The timing is pure coincidence, he says, although it pleases him. Trudeau still likes to celebrate the happy anniversaries, if not the sad ones. In fact, back in 2004, he proposed to his girlfriend, Sophie Grégoire, on Pierre’s birthday, Oct. 18, over champagne and oysters at a Montreal hotel, after a joint morning visit to his father’s gravesite.

There is no use denying the obvious. Trudeau is now the front-runner to take the mantle of the federal Liberal leadership mostly because of his family name. But the coming seven months—and if he wins, the three years before the next election—will be about convincing people he deserves it on his own merits. That at his core, there’s something more on offer than a recycled 1970s vision of the country and its people. But his first task is to cut through all the hype and nostalgia, and show people something new: “It’s about introducing the deeper side of me. A fuller perspective of who I am, than what people have been used to,” he says, his voice once again dipping into its huskier, serious register. “This is not a whim or a lark or a chance for me to enter another popularity contest. This is about us collectively pulling together to build a better Canada.”

As he approaches his 41st birthday, Justin Trudeau is taking himself seriously. What he’s gambling is that Canadians are finally ready to do the same.

Pierre Trudeau was 49 when he won the Liberal leadership convention in April 1968 and succeeded Lester Pearson, becoming Canada’s 15th prime minister. He was 52 when he finally got married to the former Margaret Sinclair, a woman 30 years his junior, and another birthday had passed when their first child, Justin, was born on Christmas Day, 1971. When the pair separated in 1977, Justin was 6, his brothers Alexandre and Michel, just 4 and 2. It was an unusual upbringing, to say the least, by an aging single dad who blocked out a couple of hours from his schedule each evening to come home, oversee homework, then tuck them in with Homer’s Odyssey as a bedtime story. And when the job demanded that he travel, Pierre often just packed the kids along. By the time he hit double digits, Justin had seen almost every corner of the country, and travelled much of the world, playing around the feet of power and witnessing history. “The first dead body I ever saw was Leonid Brezhnev,” he let slip to an interviewer from the Globe and Mail a few years back.

When Trudeau resigned in the spring of 1984, after almost 16 tumultuous years in power, and moved the family from Ottawa to Montreal it was a massive adjustment. That fall, Justin turned up at College Jean-de-Brébeuf, the same elite private school his father had attended more than 45 years before. He was 13, the son of a public figure who was as much reviled as loved, and on the wrong side of every political argument in a francophone high school. And to cap it off, he insisted on riding a unicycle to school. “You can imagine how that went over,” Marc Miller, a friend since Brébeuf days, now a Montreal lawyer and member of his campaign team, says wryly. “But we were a group of oddballs.”

His natural constituency in school was the outsiders—immigrants, the lone Jewish kid, and like him, the sons of “mixed” anglo-franco marriages. They formed a tight-knit club, and more than two decades later, remain part of each other’s lives, chatting or exchanging emails almost every week, and gathering a few times a year to celebrate birthdays and other milestones. “We keep him grounded,” explains Mathieu Walker, another old friend, now a cardiologist at a Montreal hospital. “For us he was never ‘Justin Trudeau.’ He was just a regular guy like us.”

Except that all his life, he has had to contend with not just his real father—a strict disciplinarian who demanded that only French be spoken at home once they moved to Montreal, and who kept Justin on such a tight financial leash that he had to borrow from his friends to finance his high school dates. But the mythic one as well—ladies man, gunslinger, scourge of separatists and Western premiers. A figure that others use to measure him, explain him, and most often, write him off. “All those people who lecture him on what his father was or wasn’t—I don’t know how he put up with it,” says Miller. “Wouldn’t you just want to deck them?”

So the people who want to cast his choice to enter the family business as the easy, or natural one, don’t get it. It’s in many ways the toughest life he could have chosen for himself. Although given how he was raised, maybe the only career where he could ever feel at home. “I always knew that this was his destiny, but I don’t think he believed that for a really long time,” says Walker. “He was a wonderful teacher, but it never felt like the right place. And he had a short attention span for those other things. But with politics, you really get the sense that he’s in it for the long haul.”

With little choice but to run as the candidate of change and renewal, Trudeau has gathered a team that is mostly notable for the absence of the usual backroom suspects. His brother Sacha is his chief Quebec lieutenant. Ben Chin, a former television journalist, is helping out in Ontario. Navdeep Bains, who lost his seat in Mississauga Brampton South in the last election, is a key organizer. The most direct link to the Trudeau family past might be Tom Pitfield, the son of Michael, who served as clerk of the Privy Council in the late 1970s.

Although at least one heavy hitter from the party’s past seems to think the son’s time has come. Speaking to reporters, Jean Chrétien praised him as a “good candidate,” and took on critics who question Trudeau’s relative lack of experience. “He’s been elected twice so far,” said the former prime minister. “It’s one more time than his father when he became the leader.”

“[Stephen] Harper had been elected once only when he became the leader. He had no experience. He was younger than Trudeau,” Chrétien continued, throwing in the examples of Joe Clark and the current U.K. prime minister, David Cameron, as precocious world leaders.

It was a nice vote of confidence, but Trudeau’s circle don’t want to see it become a trend. The third-place party desperately needs the type of attention that comes with a protracted and vigorous battle for the leadership. And Trudeau himself needs to be tested by friendly fire before walking into combat with Harper and the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair. “I think Justin’s at his best, like most human beings, when he’s got competition,” says Gerry Butts, who will be slotting his campaign duties around his day job as head of the World Wildlife Federation in Canada. “We want a full fight.”

With good reason. The defining moment of Trudeau’s young political career so far, didn’t come in the House of Commons, but rather a boxing ring, when he squared off in a charity bout against Patrick Brazeau, a 37-year-old Conservative senator, last March. Few gave the tall and lithe Trudeau a chance of winning. Brazeau is a burly former member of the Canadian Forces, he holds a black belt in karate, his arms are huge and decorated with lots of tats. And the ballroom was packed with Ottawa media and politicos eager to witness the silver-spoon kid’s comeuppance at the hands of a guy who grew up on a First Nations reserve near Maniwaki, Que. Sun TV, Canada’s Limbaugh-lite news channel, broadcast the event live with host Ezra Levant, a former Canadian Alliance staffer, all but guaranteeing the destruction of a man he has dubbed Canada’s Paris Hilton. The thing is that Trudeau didn’t lose. In fact, he out-boxed Brazeau by a considerable margin, scoring a technical knockout in the third round. “Patrick never stood a chance against me,” says Trudeau. “He wasn’t in very good shape. I had trained against bruisers like him for the previous three months and I learned, thank God, that I could take whatever they dished out and still punch back.”

What Trudeau hasn’t previously disclosed is the phone call his trainer received the morning before the fight, warning them that the fix was in. It seems that there was a Patrick Brazeau, born in the same year as the senator and from the same region, who had 13 amateur bouts to his credit. If it was the same person, boxing rules prohibited him from being in a ring with a novice like Trudeau, who had taken boxing lessons in his youth, but never fought before. A worried Trudeau called the evening’s organizer to ask if based on what he had witnessed in training, he thought it would be a fair fight, but never shared the information. Assured that it would, he decided to take his chances.

When the bell sounded for the first round, Brazeau charged out of his corner and started punching with abandon. “I was being pummelled and hit harder than I’d ever been hit before in all my training, and I actually started to feel my legs start to go,” recounts Trudeau. “It was going completely haywire, and I was like, ‘Goddamn it! I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’m going to let down my friends and family.’ Then suddenly he stopped hitting me. And I started blocking his punches, and then he was breathing heavy.”

Trudeau has never asked Brazeau about his boxing record. And based on the events of that night, he doesn’t think it was the same guy. “I cannot believe that someone who had 13 fights would have blown his entire load in the first 45 seconds,” says Trudeau. (In an interview with Maclean’s, the senator reaffirmed that he had never been in the ring before that night. He says he learned that there was another Patrick Brazeau when he applied to the Ontario Boxing Association for a fight passport.) But it’s clear the scare made the would-be Liberal leader’s victory all the sweeter.

And regardless of the circumstances, the bout seemed to signal a real turning point in Trudeau’s relationship with the media. Almost overnight, a suspicious press gallery turned into a bunch of swooning Norman Mailers. With indisputable evidence of Trudeau’s grit, it was suddenly acceptable to take his ambitions seriously. Once flaky—“his mother’s son” has been the shorthand insult—he was now daring. For years he’d been driving the old man’s gull-wing Mercedes convertible, and wearing his fringed buckskin jacket. But now finally, they declared, the son had come up with a stunt worthy of his father.

Trudeau knows the love-in was temporary. And that if he wants similar shows of respect from the media and his opponents he must make toughness as big a part of his arsenal as charm and empathy. Consequently, as the campaign kicks off, he’s full of blunt talk for both friends and foes. “The Liberal party needs to have people start thinking that voting for us is not dividing the country and ensuring that Mr. Harper continues to govern,” he says at the café, tapping the table with his long fingers for emphasis. “This mushy spot that we’ve stuck in people’s minds for so long—as being of the centre, not left, not right, but willing to shift policies based on what seems popular—needs to be turned into a great strength. That we are the party that is willing to look at all solutions, and not be bound to a particular group of voters, or region, or ideology.”

He’s also taking aim at the Prime Minister, warming to the theme that Harper’s brand of politics is tearing at the fabric of the nation. “What comes through is that fundamentally, he doesn’t trust Canadians. He doesn’t feel that being open, accessible, transparent and sharing the point of what he’s doing would be helpful to his success as Prime Minister,” says Trudeau. “And while you can get elected through the politics of division, and reaching out to this group, or that group, you can’t govern worth a damn. His majority is proof of that.”

But those looking for policy specifics will be disappointed—at least in the short term. Trudeau says he won’t fall into “the trap” of trying to prove his worthiness by locking down all the answers in advance. Under his leadership, or someone else’s, the Liberals will have a platform for 2015. Right now, he says, it’s all about the big picture.

Taking the Liberals from the edge of irrelevance back to government is a big ask, something that is perhaps beyond his, or anyone else’s, gifts and capabilities. But Trudeau says he’s looking forward to the challenge. For too long people have loved or hated him mostly for reasons that are beyond his control, whether it’s nostalgia, wishful thinking or ancient prejudices. Now he’s ready to be judged for who he is, and who he wants to become. “I’ve really thought about this, about how it’s going to be harder for me to dismiss all the haters from now on,” he says. “Up until now, it’s been about how they hated my father, and therefore hated the son, for superficial, silly reasons. Now I’m going to start bringing forward ideas and positions and representing a level of threat to certain people. It’s going to lead to people disliking me. But at least it will be for real, substantial reasons, not because of my hair.”

The speech he spent weeks crafting to announce his leadership bid featured only a couple of references to his father—most notably a Bible verse from St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that Pierre read aloud at Michel’s 1998 funeral. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child. But now that I am a man, I put away childish things.” It was a very deliberate choice. “My father’s values and vision of this country obviously form everything I have as values and ideals. But this is not the ghost of my father running for the leadership of the Liberal party. This is me,” says Trudeau. Long accustomed to embracing his legacy, he now needs to push it away. He’s not just somebody’s son anymore. Win or lose, he’s determined to prove that he’s his own man.

He said his name was Justin—just another itinerant snowboard instructor at the Whistler-Blackcomb resort, there in the winter of 1997 for the crappy pay, occasional tips and the all-important mountain pass. He was assigned to Sean Smillie’s Ride Tribe boarding classes. Lord knows Smillie could use the help. “We’d juggle 100 little kids a day on the mountain, running round, chasing after them,” Smillie recalls 15 years later over a coffee in Vancouver’s Gastown.

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“If you can imagine, learning how to snowboard is about one of the funniest things in the world for a kid, so I had to have a really particular kind of staff,” says Smillie. This Justin guy, a student at the University of British Columbia, was studying to be a teacher. He was great with kids, was a gifted, if chaotic, boarder and clearly knew the terrain. Strange thing was this Justin boarded in a fireman’s jacket, at least until he got his official instructor’s uniform, which was . . . unusual. But, whatever, it’s Whistler, right?

Smillie and his instructors were all of similar age and disposition. Loved the kids, loved the social life, loved above all the downtime carving tracks on virgin snow on the most extreme runs on the two mountains. Smillie’s job was to cruise the classes, and help out where needed. “Justin always got the wild, crazy kids who were running all over the mountain. He was perfect for that, so I ended up working with him a lot, riding with him and the kids. We became buddies out of that.” Still, says Smillie, “I had no idea who he was, not for months and months. No clue.” When you’re young and you work at a resort like Whistler, you tend to live for the moment and the weather forecast; the past is parked outside the bubble. Finally someone mentioned that his buddy was the eldest son of ex-prime minister Trudeau. That Trudeau? “I kind of did the sudden stop—wait a minute!” Smillie says. “I just kind of asked him one day: ‘Is your father Pierre?’ And that was it.” Life went on as before.

Trudeau wasn’t hiding his surname, Smillie says, he just wasn’t advertising it. It’s understandable, says another friend of his, that if you were born on a Christmas Day as the eldest son of one of Canada’s most famous families, you’d want to make your mark and avoid the notoriety as long as possible. Perhaps that’s why Pierre’s three sons came of age largely beyond public view: Alexandre (Sacha), the middle son, travelling in Africa; Michel, the youngest, working at Red Mountain ski resort in Rossland, deep in south-central B.C.; Justin, as elusive as yesterday’s tracks in the snow, shuttling between university and later teaching duties at a private school in Vancouver, with weekends and holidays in Whistler. It would take the deaths of two of those closest to Justin—brother Michel and father Pierre—to thrust him into public view.

British Columbia was more than a playground and refuge for the Trudeau boys, it was something of a third home, after Ottawa and Montreal. Their mother Margaret came from a family famous in its own right. Her father, James (Jimmy) Sinclair, was a Liberal organizer, elected in 1940 as MP for North Vancouver. He served 18 years, seven of those as fisheries minister and B.C. fixer under Louis St. Laurent. The Sinclair Centre, an imposing stone block of high-end retail and federal offices in downtown Vancouver, is named for Jimmy. So too is Justin Pierre James Trudeau.

Pierre and Margaret were married in B.C.; they honeymooned in Whistler. Much of Margaret’s family remains in the province. Justin’s first real job, teaching French, literature and a bit of drama, was at Vancouver’s exclusive West Point Grey Academy. Michel’s body rests in the depths of Kokanee Lake. Justin’s bond with the province is profound.

In those carefree board-bum days, Justin’s Trudeau-Sinclair pedigree went mostly unnoticed or unremarked upon, says Smillie. In the public imagination, he was still a little kid swinging from Dad and Mom’s arms. Many of the boarding students were kids from Britain, Saudi Arabia or elsewhere. Canadian kids were unlikely to make the link between a former prime minister and their hyperkinetic mid-20s instructor. “Justin was literally as big a kid as the rest of them,” Smillie says.

Smillie describes a hand-to-mouth existence far removed from Trudeau’s previous life at 24 Sussex Dr., Ottawa. On Friday nights, Justin would arrive in Whistler from university and later his teaching job, to crash on Smillie’s couch to be ready for teaching or riding, if they weren’t needed at the boarding school. His car was a battered monster of a Mercedes, if Smillie’s memory serves. “We called it the staff car. We always thought it should have belonged in a movie with flags coming off it. It was really big and old and wide, and just terrible. It had holes in it. We’d throw our boards in the back. That thing was pretty much a death trap in the winter.”

Meals were a steady diet of fast food if they were flush (Trudeau still makes a regular pilgrimage to B.C.’s White Spot hamburger chain), or Kraft Dinner if they weren’t. Politics was rarely ever on the menu. The subjects were the day’s boarding, history—a subject both men have a passion for—and the endless stream of action and horror movies they watched when there wasn’t enough tip money to go out. Smillie would bounce ideas for screenplays and video game scenarios off Trudeau. Smillie would go on to play a key role in producing and designing the SSX extreme-snowboarding video games for Electronic Arts before striking out as a freelance game designer and screenwriter.

“None of us have ever been big-time drinkers, partiers. It wasn’t the reason for being there. The group of guys we hung out with, we had all come to Whistler for the exact same reason, which was actually the ride,” Smillie says. “It wasn’t so much the partying and the female population. That was a nice benefit.”

Trudeau was controlled chaos on the slopes, flying down the mountains, cutting paths through the trees. “He’s not the guy you want to ride behind because you’re going to get a big, long limb in the face if you got too close.” Inevitably, the last ride of the day was a race from the top of Blackcomb to the bottom, cutting through about 10 different runs. In all the hundreds of days they logged on the mountains, there were no injuries. “We were very, very lucky,” says Smillie, “and a little bit stupid.”

The easy times ended as suddenly as the avalanche that swept Michel Trudeau into Kokanee Lake on Nov. 13, 1998, while he was backcountry skiing in B.C.’s Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. He was 23. The family was devastated. Margaret, already emotionally fragile, seemed in a daze. Pierre looked frail and diminished. Many Canadians were shocked to see a reversal of roles at the funeral. This time the parents were held up by Justin and Sacha—two strong young men who had grown into adulthood far from the public eye. Sacha had aided in the futile search for Michel. Justin took the role of family spokesman. “[Justin] was able to pull his family together and be a rock when his dad was devastated,” says Bruce Young, a friend of Justin’s, a former Liberal staffer in Ottawa and a backroom organizer in B.C. “He was devastated, too, but he was the one who held it together when his old man and his mother weren’t able to,” Young says. “It was kind of a moment where he became the man in the family.”

Justin threw himself into a public role for the first time in his adult life, raising funds and awareness with the Canadian Avalanche Association. He gave speeches and staged fundraising events across the province, and with the help of his mother and brother, raised money to build a hiker’s cabin in the park dedicated to Michel and 16 others who had died in avalanches in the area.

He and Smillie filmed avalanche-awareness spots for use on MuchMusic. “I won’t speak for [Justin],” says Smillie, “but what I saw was that his brother loved the mountains, so I think it was important to him to talk about the safety aspect.”

It wasn’t long after Michel’s death before Justin was back ripping down mountains again. He found solace there among his friends. “It was a big turning point for us in a way, because all of a sudden, we had to look at our own riding,” says Smillie. “We started wearing helmets. And we were a little less inclined to go charging out of bounds. I think it was also a big moment of checking your own mortality at that age.”

Real life was intruding. Jobs pulled several buddies away from Whistler. Justin, at 29, had thrown his enthusiasm into teaching. Smillie, in the summer of 2000, roomed at Justin’s Vancouver apartment awaiting the start of a video-gaming job that fall. That September it was clear that Pierre, stricken with Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer, was failing. Justin, Sacha and Margaret maintained a bedside vigil until his death on Sept. 28.

Of the funeral that followed, nothing is as memorable as Justin’s eulogy—a beautiful celebration of a man, a father and a prime minister, delivered with pain and poise, and the polish of an orator. It brought many Canadians to tears. And like most everything a Trudeau touches, it brought more than its share of criticism. It inspired an academic paper: “Je t’aime, Papa”: Theatricality and the Fifth Canon of Rhetoric in Justin Trudeau’s Eulogy for his Father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Right-wing journalist Peter Worthington slagged his “performance” as a neo-political speech. “I’m not suggesting his grief wasn’t real, but Justin, a drama teacher, is his father’s son and the father was a consummate actor, ham, show-off, poseur, exhibitionist . . .”

At the funeral, Justin’s mother saw no artifice, only a shattered son, “looking almost as if he had fallen on his father’s coffin,” she wrote in her memoir Changing My Mind. She tried to rise to comfort him, but it was Cuba’s Fidel Castro, a family friend, who held her back: “He’s a man, Margaret. He’s a man.” In a sense, Castro had it right. After that funeral, neither fan nor foe saw Justin in the same light again; certainly not as the little boy at his parents’ side.

The day of the funeral in Montreal, there was a poignant memorial service for Trudeau conducted by staff and students around the flagpole at West Point Grey Academy. It was clear the students were grieving for their popular teacher as much as this statesman they knew only from history books. He was a French teacher to some, an English lit teacher to others; an ultimate Frisbee coach after-hours.

Later headmaster Clive Austin told of a day during the summer term of 1999 when Justin proudly showed his father around the school. “He was walking down the hallway with his dad and there was a student behind him, who said, ‘Mr. Trudeau, can I please speak with you for a moment?’ ” Austin recounted. “And Justin turned about and said, ‘Dad, this young lady would like to talk to you.’

“And she said, ‘No, Mr. Trudeau, I want to talk to you.’ And he suddenly realized,” Austin said, “he was not under the shadow of his father’s name.”

The Justin that Bruce Young knows is that man: the confident husband, father and politician. They became friends in 2007 during a fact-finding trip to Israel. Young had done extensive research, but it was clear from Trudeau’s questions and his grasp of players and events, that he’d read more and prepared better. “I realized then he was smart, and I realized what has been proven out in other circumstances, that he was a fairly serious preparer.” It was how he won the nomination and back-to-back elections in his largely sovereignist Montreal riding, how he trained for a certain boxing match, how he came out against the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline across B.C.; and how Young expects he will lay the groundwork for his run for the Liberal leadership.

“People get into this infantile discussion: ‘Is he more like his father? Is he more like his mother?’ From the perspective of an organizer, he’s more like his grandfather [Sinclair],” says Young. “His grandfather was a tough-nosed, old-school Scottish-Canadian political operative from the North Shore. He organized block-by-block, street-by-street—ask people for their support, shake their hands, sit down at the kitchen table. That was his grandfather.” A grandfather who was a high school teacher, too, long before he became a politician.

Sometimes, back in the day, Smillie would wonder whether his friend would follow his father’s path into politics. It’s something they never really discussed, as “it seemed like a million miles away.” Even now when they speak, it’s about other things: Smillie’s latest project, or Trudeau’s wife and kids, or a catch-up on the old Whistler gang.

He’s pleased at the buzz his old pal is generating. “If everyone is going to be talking about politics, and the people in politics, inevitably they’re going to start talking about the issues in politics, so I think it’s great.” Justin Trudeau will throw himself into this the way he throws himself down a mountain, Smillie predicts. Anyone who plays follow-the-leader is in for one hell of a ride.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/breaking-out-of-bounds/feed/1And in this corner, Mark Carney?http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-right-contender/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-right-contender/#commentsTue, 09 Oct 2012 15:04:01 +0000John Geddeshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=299651Liberals hunting for a fiscally minded champion to take on Trudeau have the Bank of Canada governor in their sights

In all the hoopla surrounding this week’s official launch of Justin Trudeau’s bid for the Liberal leadership, something was missing. Just about every ranking Liberal, including those rushing to support Trudeau, declared a preference for an exciting, competitive race rather than a “coronation.” But where was Trudeau’s worthy adversary? The long-established pattern in the party, going back decades, has been for a champion representing its progressive wing to square off against a rival preferred by its business-oriented side. And if Trudeau fits the former role, there can be little doubt who would be the dream champion of the latter camp—Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney.

Despite the absence of even the faintest hint of public confirmation from Carney, or any reliable source close to him, that the star central banker might be contemplating a jump into politics, that scenario is being feverishly discussed by Liberal insiders. “I don’t think there’s any question there are a lot of people in the party who would love it if he ran,” says Tim Murphy, a Toronto lawyer who served as chief of staff to former prime minister Paul Martin. “The problem is no one knows if he’s actually interested.”

Murphy counts himself among Liberals who want the party to emphasize economic pragmatism and managerial experience as critical to refurbishing its tattered brand. They contrast themselves, in broad terms, with fellow Grits who are more preoccupied with progressive causes—especially, in recent years, environmental policy. Murphy argues that running mainly on those left-of-centre themes suggests “a longer path back to power,” battling the New Democrats to regain status as the main alternative to the Tories over two or three elections. The other possible path, he contends, would be “to present a centrist image based in economic competence,” competing head-on with Stephen Harper’s Conservatives right away, while aiming to marginalize Thomas Mulcair’s NDP as lacking “economic understanding and skills.”

Only a truly game-changing leader would make that sort of rapid up-the-middle drive back to electoral competitiveness seem plausible for the humbled, third-place Liberals. “Given how I’ve framed the challenge,” Murphy says, “that’s the reason you keep hearing his name. If you’re going to define the question that way, Mark Carney is the answer.”

The fact that so many Liberals are thrilled by Trudeau—who has only been an MP since 2008—and others tantalized by the prospect of Carney, who has never been in politics at all, is itself remarkable. After all, the party has only been out of power since 2006, yet not a single senior cabinet figure from its recent 13-year run in government has hung around to contend for the leadership. The MPs most often touted as possible challengers to Trudeau arrived in Ottawa after the era of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, or were second-tier players late in those glory years. Dominic LeBlanc, for instance, has held his New Brunswick seat since 2000, while Marc Garneau, the former astronaut, was first elected in his Montreal riding in 2008.

Harvard Business School professor Gautam Mukunda analyzes routes to leadership in his new book Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter. He looks at how titans from Abraham Lincoln to Winston Churchill, along with some less-famous figures, got their jobs and changed history. Mukunda pays close attention to what he calls an organization’s “leadership filtration process.” So, for instance, big public companies tend to be led by highly filtered CEOs, tested repeatedly as they worked their way up through corporate bureaucracies. The leaders of entrepreneurial ventures are at the other extreme, often barely filtered at all.

Political parties can go either way when it comes to picking leaders. Mukunda notes that British prime ministers tend to be far more filtered—tested and scrutinized in Parliament—than U.S. presidents. In fact, even the least-experienced British prime minister in history, John Major, had served 11 years as an MP. Many U.S. presidents have moved into the White House boasting far less experience in elected office. Lincoln was a one-term congressman when he was picked to be the Republican presidential nominee in 1860. Choosing an unfiltered leader is sometimes the inadvertent result of circumstances, but it can also be the deliberate gamble of a party with little to lose. “The chosen person may fail,” Mukunda writes, “but failure is already the most likely outcome.”

Although he doesn’t survey Canadian politics, Mukunda said in an interview the unfiltered choices represented by Trudeau and Carney strongly suggest Liberals see themselves in a situation where “a conventionally capable leader just won’t be enough.” Trudeau’s charisma and his family name as the son of a famous former prime minister are what Mukunda calls “intensifiers”—traits that help leaders bypass filtration processes. For his part, Carney’s remarkable success as a central banker might appear to provide insight into how he would fare in politics, but Mukunda’s research suggests stellar performance in one field is a notoriously poor predictor of outcomes in another. “The skill set involved in being a really good central banker,” he says, “is extraordinarily different from that involved in being a really good elected politician.”

Still, the Liberal Party of Canada has a surprisingly successful track record when it comes to recruiting leaders from outside the ranks of seasoned politicians. John English, author of an award-winning two-volume biography of Pierre Trudeau and himself a former Liberal MP, points to William Lyon Mackenzie King, who had been an MP for just three years, and then lost his seat, before he was chosen as Liberal leader in 1919, and went on to be quite a resilient prime minister. Pierre Trudeau had been an MP for less than three years, serving only briefly as justice minister, before his long run as PM began in 1968. (The Conservatives, for their part, chose Brian Mulroney as leader in 1983 before he’d ever sat in Parliament, and Mulroney won the largest majority in Canadian history the following year.) “By the time of the next election, Justin will have had seven years in Parliament,” English says. “Inexperience is a weak justification for opposing him.”

If he views Trudeau’s relatively short tenure in politics as perfectly in keeping with Liberal leadership tradition, English sees the absence of a strong pro-business voice in the race as a break with the party’s past. To win from the centre, he argues, the Liberals have needed figures who appealed to voters on both the right and left. That sometimes uneasy balance, or outright tension, has been reflected repeatedly in past leadership battles—Trudeau on the left beating Robert Winters on the right in 1968, John Turner on the right beating Chrétien on the left in 1984, and Chrétien beating businessman-turned-politician Paul Martin in 1990. (The centre-straddling winners frequently went on to confound pigeonholing, as when Turner veered left with his anti-free-trade stance in the 1988 election or Chrétien tacked right as a deficit-fighter in the mid-1990s.)

For now, with Justin Trudeau dominating the leadership buzz, business-friendly Liberals feel adrift. Doug Richardson, a lawyer and long-time Liberal organizer in Saskatoon, who in the past supported Turner and Martin, calls it “ridiculous” for his party to cede the chance to run against the Conservatives on economic issues in the next election. He points to Stephen Harper’s early cutting of the GST as bad fiscal policy, and contrasts Chrétien’s balancing of the books against Harper’s presiding over the return of red ink. But Richardson doesn’t so far see a Liberal contender, like those he’s backed before, with clear credentials to carry that message. “There was always an identified business candidate,” he says of past contests, then adds: “Of course, there’s always this chat about Mr. Carney.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-right-contender/feed/25All evidence indicates that bearing the Trudeau name isn’t a liability in Quebechttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/all-evidence-indicates-that-bearing-the-trudeau-name-isnt-a-liability-in-quebec/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/all-evidence-indicates-that-bearing-the-trudeau-name-isnt-a-liability-in-quebec/#commentsWed, 03 Oct 2012 22:28:50 +0000Martin Patriquinhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=299532Being in the Liberal party on the other hand...

Justin Trudeau was his usual schmaltzy, painfully earnest, bilingual self last night, and good lord did the crowd eat it up. Outside of church or your average Justin Bieber concert, you rarely see so many enraptured faces and hands clasped over hearts. And you know what? Good for him. Even though there is a certain Gouda quality to his delivery, and even if his frequent cozy bromides to Canada may set one’s teeth on edge, this much is true: Trudeau believes every word that flows out of his mouth. When he says he loves Canada, over and over, it’s not because he’s trying to convince you of as much. It’s because he really means it, perhaps more and more every time he says it.

In Quebec, that is part of the problem. At least, so goes the prevailing wisdom in the province. The thinking is this: much like his father before him, Trudeau is an Ottawa-first centralisateur who sees Quebec as just another province. Not only did he stifle Quebec’s collective will by running a campaign of fear during the 1980 referendum, he had the gall to jam the Charter of Rights and Freedoms down the province’s gullet in its aftermath. Pierre Trudeau, said red-headed separatist firebrand Pierre Bourgault in 1990, “never ceased to violently attack Quebecers.” And like his father, Trudeau fils will only embarrass himself and his party if he tries his hammy I-Love-Canada schtick outside a few cloistered ridings on the island of Montreal.

Nationalists like Bourgault birthed the theory that thanks to their long memories and freakish sense of betrayal, Quebecers despised Trudeau (and by extension the Liberal brand) en masse. Alas, it doesn’t really square with the facts. Trudeau won a majority of Quebec seats (if not always the popular vote) in each of his elections, despite his well-known reputation as a separatist-baiting so-and-so. Sure, his party took a bath in the province in the wake of the repatriation of the constitution, but that had arguably as much to do with high debt and a morose economy as it did bruised feelings in Trudeau’s province of birth. And anyway, if there was a hate-on for Trudeau, it was pan-Canadian in nature: in 1984, two years seven months after Trudeau took his walk in the snow, Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives trounced the Liberals across the country.

Ah, but Trudeau’s legacy continued to haunt his party’s fortunes in Quebec, right? Not really. In 1993, despite the advent of the Bloc Québécois, Jean Chrétien still managed to win 33 per cent of the vote in the province. During the next two elections, Liberal fortunes in the province rose: 38 per cent in 1997, 44 per cent in 2000. For sovereignists, it was almost worse than losing ground to Trudeau; they were losing ground to Trudeau’s bagman. And the Bloc has never reached the 50 per cent threshold in voter support, despite Gilles Duceppe’s inclusive-sounding ”Quebec values in Ottawa” spiel.

If Trudeau has a problem in Quebec, it isn’t his love for what he called the “magnificent, unlikely country” he wishes to one day govern. It’s the Liberal Party’s attempts to try and sell that magnificent, unlikely country back to Quebecers. Quite simply, the Sponsorship scandal ruined the Liberal brand in the province, and it has yet to recover. Strange but true: forking out $100 million to various advertising and branding agencies without much oversight and with even less results isn’t such a hot idea. Just ask Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff. Neither Liberal leader was involved in the Sponsorship Scandal, yet both suffered from its fallout in Quebec nonetheless. (With 24 and 14 per cent of Quebec’s voter share, respectively.)

The collapse of the Bloc and Quebec’s cynicism-free embrace of the NDP show that being a Canada-loving federalist like Jack Layton isn’t a liability at all. Just the opposite, in fact: according to a recent Ipsos-Reid poll, 30 per cent of Bloc Québécois voters thought Trudeau was the country’s best Prime Minister, and only eight per cent thought he was the worst. In this respect, the Trudeau name isn’t nearly the liability Quebec nationalists would like to think. Unfortunately for young Trudeau, the same can’t be said for the party he hopes to lead.

Justin Trudeau’s expected move into contention for the Liberal crown revives memories of a half-century ago, sitting around a polished table in a refurbished farmhouse near Ottawa, when I was part of a small knot of media junkies quaffing sangria and talking politics. This was in 1968, when it was his father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, about to hurl himself into the political snakepit, who was the topic of intense speculation.

There is a disconnect between the storied political campaign of the intellectual gunslinger who put us on the map with his macho pirouettes and devil-may-care gestures, and his eldest son, whose entry owes more to boxing than thinking outside the box. One vague link occurs. The year that the senior Trudeau was crowned coincided with Ben Tre, the Vietnamese city that the Americans, then at war, had to “destroy to save it.” Unless Justin as leader applies some harsh medicine to the remnants of the Liberal party, he will end up like Ben Mulroney, hosting entertainment shows. (Already the politician, Justin invited Ben to his wedding to glamorous CTV talk show correspondent Sophie Grégoire.)

A high school teacher when he wore a cropped version of a Johnny Depp beard, Justin reached out to the country only once before, at his father’s funeral: voicing the most poignant of the elegies, ending his prayer with the heart-rending, “Je t’aime, papa.” Prayers will come in handy should he be charged with rescuing the Liberals, who haven’t been the country’s Natural Governing Party since Noah launched his ark, or so it seems. The state of the Grits in the past decade adds up to an act of supreme self-immolation. They have lost every power base they once commanded: Quebec, the Maritimes, rural Ontario and Toronto. Their record in the past four elections, as they spiralled toward political purgatory, was to lose an average of 30 seats at a time in the past four elections. The downward momentum increased in the last election, when they gave up 43 constituencies, including that of the enigmatic Michael Ignatieff, the party’s previous instant messiah. The best brain of his generation he may have been, but without any discernable focus, he became the Titanic of his party and hasn’t surfaced since.

The Liberal party inherited by Pierre in 1968 also required a messiah, because the previous PMs, John Diefenbaker and Mike Pearson, had acted like mountain goats with locked horns. It took the iconoclasm of a catalyst of Trudeau’s determination and muscular vision to break the impasse, and he remained in office for most of the next 16 years.

The necessity for a saviour was much less apparent then than it is now, when the Liberals appear to be a vanishing species not just federally, but in Quebec, British Columbia and even Ontario.

It was a dreamy interlude, back in that heady evening of the inaugural Trudeau apparition. There we were in the welcome embrace of one of those glorious central Ontario clover-laden evenings, getting deeper into the Spanish red, when a vaguely radical CBC type mentioned a book he had been reading, The Morning of the Magicians. Its theme was to wrap the visionary ideals of the 1960s in a mystical aura, which suited the mood of our gathering just fine. We were so caught up in the spirit of the occasion that no one hooted in derision when it was suggested in the self-deprecating manner of Canadian intellectuals that Trudeau must be “some kind of goddamn magician,” as one of the revellers put it. The trick would be to adapt Trudeau’s perceived perfections into the operational code of the nation’s highest office—or so we thought.

Pierre Trudeau seemed to appear on the national scene out of nowhere, like a desert prince who follows the shifting sands. In fact he was the product of a crammed, precisely plotted educational regime that included stints at Harvard, École libre des sciences politiques, the London School of Economics and the Université de Montréal—an academic immersion that didn’t end until he entered active politics at age 46, a decade later than his eldest son. If Pierre’s conquest of the Liberal party appeared in retrospect to have been predestined, it was anything but. In fact, Trudeau’s victory seemed scarcely credible, much more far-fetched than inevitable. To most Liberals, Trudeau was an untested outsider whose only distinction was the red rose in his lapel—a disturbing presence not easily encompassed by the collective Liberal mindset that assumed its destiny was simply to carry on as the nation’s Natural Governing Party.

The denizens of the Rideau Club, the luncheon venue where the power barons gathered, were fond of telling one another about the time Trudeau turned up on a Saturday morning at the Privy Council Office dressed in desert boots and a boiler suit. The commissionaire on duty, convinced Trudeau was a plumber guided by a jumbled worksheet, turned him away. In the early speculative talk about leadership candidates, he was dismissed as a bad joke. (“How could anybody who combs his hair forward, like Julius Caesar at a Stratford matinee, presume to lead the country?”) Enlightened Liberals—both of them—felt they wanted a dramatic change from the Pearson brand of poker politics, a candidate who could re-establish public trust in the party and reawaken confidence in itself.

As soon as Trudeau hinted that he might be available, historians smelling of water biscuits, lobbyists desperate for credit ratings, the usual whisky priests and progressive thinkers of every vintage began coalescing behind his candidacy. Toronto artist Mashel Teitelbaum circulated a petition urging him to run, which eventually comprised 600 big-name signatures. In a courting mood, but not committing himself, Trudeau left for a holiday in the South Pacific. “Before I make my decision,” he told me before leaving, “I’ve got to find out whether it’s really possible to do anything once I get into the prime minister’s office.” Instead, he met Maggie Sinclair in a bikini.

In every successful political campaign there is an identifiable moment when it catches fire, when natural momentum overtakes plotted positions and propels a candidate into the lead. For Pierre Trudeau, that moment arrived on Jan. 28, 1968, at the Quebec Liberal Federation meeting held in Montreal’s Hotel Bonaventure. Jean Marchand, as the Liberals’ Quebec lieutenant, had craftily made sure that none of the candidates would be allowed to address the federation, even though Quebec would be sending 626 delegates to the leadership convention. Since he was not yet a candidate, Trudeau could appropriately deliver the conference’s keynote address. Using a screen that listed all of Quebec’s options (from separation to absolute monarchy) in crystal-clear prose, Trudeau demonstrated why federalism would ensure the province the most attractive destiny. At the end of Trudeau’s speech, they cheered and sang Il a gagné ses épaulettes. When one enthusiast yelled out, “THE NEXT PRIME MINISTER!” Trudeau bowed his head, shrugged, waved his hands in self-deprecating gestures, shrugged again, and sat down. Whatever doubts had existed among his followers about the willingness of Quebec delegates to support his leadership had vanished.

Their confidence was confirmed when Claude Frenette defeated Yves Paré, an old-guard candidate, by a four-to-one margin in the key vote for the presidency of the Quebec Liberal Federation. That evening Trudeau walked into Frenette’s hotel room, hugged him and said, “We beat the bastards. Now it’s possible for us to do things.” At the annual meeting of the Ontario Liberals in Toronto that followed, Trudeau’s delegate assault was organized by Robert Stanbury, Tim Reid and Charles Caccia. He was carried through the meeting hall on delegates’ shoulders and, for the first time, there was evidence of Trudeaumania, the spectacle of teenyboppers in miniskirts squealing at the sight of him. Their reaction was best described by Elmer Sopha, a playful Ontario MPP, who reported, “Their eyes are transfixed and they seem to be breathing through their toenails. You’d think they all had asthma.”

On Feb. 14, 1968, Trudeau finally announced his official entry in the race at an Ottawa press conference, accusing the media of creating his candidacy as a joke on the Liberals: “When I saw the response from political people, from members of the party and responsible members of Parliament, this is when I began to wonder if this whole thing was not a bit more serious than you and I had intended. It looks a bit like when I tried to enter the party. I didn’t think the Liberal party would take me and suddenly, they did. So I was stuck with it. Well, now you’re stuck with me.” Almost immediately, the contest became Trudeau against all the others. Riding a chartered jet, huddled inside the folds of his leather coat, Trudeau travelled 32,000 km, making 30 pit stops. Every appearance ignited standing ovations. Few recall the cliffhanger final score: he won the leadership with merely 51.1 per cent of the votes on the fourth ballot.

The general election that followed was a combination of coronation and Beatles tour. The same teenyboppers with manes of streaming hair gripped their machine-autographed photos of Pierre-baby and screamed whenever he deigned to hug one of their swarming numbers. Bemused toddlers borne on their parents’ shoulders were admonished to “remember him,” as excitement surged across the country. Press cameras clicked like hungry insects.

This also marked the inauguration of the dance of the klieg lights that was most directly responsible for Trudeau’s victory. There were eight serious candidates, forcing the television producers to narrow their coverage. To a man, and they still were all men, they assumed a Trudeau victory long before the delegates or the contender himself made that freefall leap of logic. Everywhere that Trudeau went he was followed by lights that bathed him in luminescence that turned into a secular halo. The more he appeared on the small screens, the more entranced Canadians were by his devil-may-care style and cool demeanour. There was about him a subtle, indefinable intensity, a suggestion of pent-up power and hidden dimensions—the identical feeling that had fuelled our bacchanalian evening at that Ottawa farmhouse.

The cameras love Justin too, but this is a different age, more accustomed to politicians playing to media. Still, the ability to hold a crowd in thrall is a rare thing, and Justin’s charm of mixing sex appeal with political ideals will take him a long way. Justin enters the race with two secret weapons: 150,000 avid Twitter followers, with the bonus that under the Grits’ revised constitution almost anyone can vote; and the campaign guidance of Gerald Butts, one of the wisest political advisers extant.

The two Trudeaus share not only a famous surname. There is an essential Pierre characteristic that I have noticed emerging in Justin, as I have watched him blossom into manhood. No matter what he did, in office or out, Pierre never failed to exercise his ultimate civil liberty: the right to be himself. Justin is cast in precisely the identical mould. As heir to that magnificent tradition, he will try to repeat history and reach for the top. Anything can happen—just watch him.

Peter C. Newman covered the national political scene for Maclean’s and has written half a dozen political bestsellers

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/trudeaus-big-leap/feed/112Justifying the Liberal party’s existencehttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/justifying-the-liberal-partys-existence/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/justifying-the-liberal-partys-existence/#commentsTue, 11 Sep 2012 13:00:35 +0000Aaron Wherryhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=292028Michael Den Tandt proposes a dozen policy directions for the Liberal party.
Make the first $25,000 of income for anyone earning their livelihood as artist, or a farmer, tax-free…Design …

Make the first $25,000 of income for anyone earning their livelihood as artist, or a farmer, tax-free…

Design a system of proportional representation, perhaps based on the Australian model, that works for Canada. Draft accountability reforms that restore the traditional powers of MPs in the House of Commons, and that cannot be scrapped or ignored if you get back into power…

Declare that the Indian Act is racist, an abomination in modern Canada. Dedicate yourself to its speedy and complete abolition in a way that respects First Nations concerns about losing even more than they’ve already lost. Wherever possible, and if local people approve, give title to existing reserve lands to the people who live on the land, to do with as they please.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/justifying-the-liberal-partys-existence/feed/17Liberals unveil campaign spending and debt rules for leadership racehttp://www.macleans.ca/general/liberals-unveil-campaign-spending-and-debt-rules-for-leadership-race/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/liberals-unveil-campaign-spending-and-debt-rules-for-leadership-race/#commentsThu, 06 Sep 2012 16:20:38 +0000macleans.cahttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=290254MONTEBELLO, Que. – The federal Liberals have set a $950,000 spending limit on a leadership race that formally gets underway in November and wraps up in Ottawa next April 14.…

MONTEBELLO, Que. – The federal Liberals have set a $950,000 spending limit on a leadership race that formally gets underway in November and wraps up in Ottawa next April 14.

The spending cap is higher than some Liberals had proposed—and almost double the limit set by the NDP in their leadership race last winter—which could favour a high-profile, powerful fundraiser such as Justin Trudeau.

The party has also put in place a relatively steep $75,000 non-refundable entry fee, to be paid in three instalments, that could narrow the field and keep out political gadflys.

And in a nod to embarrassing leadership debt problems that still plague several of the also-rans in the 2006 Liberal leadership race, the new rules stipulate that no candidate can run up a total campaign debt of more than $75,000.

With the once-mighty Big Red Machine down to 35 seats and third-party status in the House of Commons, many Liberals feel the party has to get this leadership race right.

Candidates will be able to sign up paying party members or non-paying supporters up to 41 days before the April 14 vote, and all supporters will have to register with the party before being eligible to cast a ballot.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/liberals-unveil-campaign-spending-and-debt-rules-for-leadership-race/feed/0Liberals set to lay out latest leadership race ruleshttp://www.macleans.ca/general/liberals-set-to-lay-out-latest-leadership-race-rules/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/liberals-set-to-lay-out-latest-leadership-race-rules/#commentsThu, 06 Sep 2012 09:39:54 +0000The Canadian Presshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=290012MONTEBELLO, Que. - The federal Liberals wrap up three days of caucus meetings today by releasing the playbook that will help determine the shape and course of the party's looming leadership race — the party's third such race in six years.

MONTEBELLO, Que. – The federal Liberals wrap up three days of caucus meetings today by releasing the playbook that will help determine the shape and course of the party’s looming leadership race — the party’s third such race in six years.

With the once-mighty Big Red Machine down to 35 seats and third-party status in the House of Commons, many Liberals feel the party has to get this one right.

As MP Dominic LeBlanc, a prospective leadership candidate, puts it, the next leader needs to commit 10 to 15 years of his or her life “occupied exclusively” with rebuilding the Liberal party and winning elections.

One leaked draft of the spending limits suggested a $75,000 non-refundable ante to enter the race and a $750,000 spending cap.

A high entry fee would keep out the political gadflys, while the cap would ensure prospective leaders aren’t saddled with debt from losing campaigns.

LeBlanc says the leadership race isn’t the place for politicians to be learning public speaking and he’d endorse a stiff entry fee.

“The Liberal leadership shouldn’t become a kind of practice for the Toastmasters club,” said the New Brunswick MP. “I think if you want to practice speech-making there are other places to do it.

“The deposit should reflect the nature of the office you’re pretending to want to occupy.”

Back in 2006 the Liberals had a refundable entry fee of $50,000 and prospective leaders were allowed to spend up to $3.4 million.

The result was a large field of candidates with little hope of winning, many of whom walked away with huge debts that have been almost impossible to repay. Earlier this summer an Ontario court rejected requests to extend the payback period for three failed candidates from the 2006 Liberal race won by Stephane Dion, putting their leadership debts into a kind of legal limbo.

Elections Canada appears to be wrestling with how to handle the arrears, since tight donation rules enacted by the Conservative government in the middle of the 2006 Liberal leadership campaign mean failed candidates can’t go back to their old supporters for another round of donations.

New Democrats put a spending cap of $500,000 on the lengthy race that crowned leader Tom Mulcair in March.

“I hope that candidates and the party itself will discourage people from assuming big debt loads,” LeBlanc said of the Liberals. “If you can’t run a campaign that’s spending the money that you’re raising, why would you think accumulating a large debt — as some people did in the past — is any easier to pay off after you’ve lost?”

Along with spending rules, party president Mike Crawley is expected to detail the voting system that will be used by the party to tally leadership support, and the exact date next April when the new leader will be announced.

As many as half a dozen of the party’s 35-member parliamentary caucus could join the hunt, depending on the rules announced and who is and isn’t in the race.

All eyes will be on party rock star Justin Trudeau, son of the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who is a fundraising magnet and who’s name recognition stretches far beyond party ranks. Fellow Montreal MP Marc Garneau, a former astronaut, is signalling he’ll likely be in the race, while LeBlanc, Dennis Coderre and David McGuinty all appear to be kicking the tires.

Others from outside caucus, including former MPs Martha Hall Findlay, Martin Cauchon and Gerard Kennedy, Ottawa lawyer David Bertschi, Toronto lawyer George Takach, Ontario government economist Jonathan Mousley and David Merner, past-president of the party’s British Columbia wing, are considering taking the plunge.

Constitutional lawyer Deborah Coyne has already announced her candidacy, as has Shane Geschiere, a Manitoba paramedic.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/liberals-set-to-lay-out-latest-leadership-race-rules/feed/0Why no one is in a hurry to lead the Liberalshttp://www.macleans.ca/authors/paul-wells/why-no-one-is-in-a-hurry-to-lead-the-liberals/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/paul-wells/why-no-one-is-in-a-hurry-to-lead-the-liberals/#commentsMon, 09 Jul 2012 18:28:01 +0000Paul Wellshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=271971The party has set an insanely lackadaisical schedule for choosing its next leader

And now we bring you exciting news from the Liberal Party of Canada, where—no, wait! Come back!

The latest news from the Liberals is that Deborah Coyne has entered the race to become, more or less, depending on definitions, the party’s sixth national leader in a decade. (I never know how to count Bill Graham.) This is an exciting development if you’re the sort of person who wishes a conversation about politics were about any other conceivable topic, just, please, not politics, because it’s pretty easy to segue from talking about Deborah Coyne to talking about how Pierre Trudeau was the father of her daughter.

Bam! Suddenly the Liberal Party is about 14 times as interesting as it was a few minutes ago. You can measure this. There are instruments to measure such things.

Coyne’s arrival in the Liberal leadership contest is encouraging for two reasons. First, because while I have already described it as a “race” and a “contest,” so far it is neither. If it were a race or a contest, it would have speed and competition. But the Liberal party executive has decided the party won’t choose a leader until the spring of 2013, so there is no speed. And while there are other candidates, they are not yet titans of Canadian public life. The declared candidates include Shane Geschiere, David Merner and Jonathan Mousley. If you ask me for more information about these gentlemen, I will be obliged to tell you Pierre Trudeau was the father of Deborah Coyne’s daughter.

Coyne is usually described as a “Toronto lawyer and policy consultant.” She is the cousin of our former colleague Andrew Coyne, who sends his regards. She was famous 20 years ago for—well, besides that, she was famous for joining the informal cabal of central government enthusiasts and Quebec special-status skeptics who came together to defeat the Meech Lake Accord. On the weekend that the three-year deadline for ratifying those proposed constitutional amendments passed and the whole deal died, Jean Chrétien hugged Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells on the floor of the Liberal convention in Calgary. It just seemed like a time when Liberals were reaching out in so many ways.

On her website Coyne has a video setting out “a bold vision for Canada.” This includes a carbon tax, as the Liberals appear to have decided to propose one of those in every second election. She’s already told my colleague John Geddes she’d want revenues from the tax to go back to the provinces where they were raised. So the carbon tax wouldn’t leave a federal government any further ahead. A Prime Minister Deborah Coyne would need some other mechanism for meeting what she calls “a huge national commitment to raise funds—the billions and billions of dollars that we need—to fix the crumbling infrastructure and to expand public transit.”

The Conservatives, then, would greet a Coyne-led Liberal party by pointing out that she wants the “permanent tax on everything” they defeated when they ran against Stéphane Dion in 2008, plus some other tax of comparable magnitude. But of course many voters support the notion of a government that wants to do great things even if it means charging taxpayers a higher price. These days, the most common term for such voters is “New Democrats.”

Like every Liberal, Coyne decries a “polarization along an outdated ideological spectrum” that forces voters to choose between Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and Thomas Mulcair’s New Democrats. But the Liberals are having a lousy year because most Canadians have no problem with that polarization. The ones who say they will vote Conservative are not, by and large, wishing for some less conservative Conservative party they could support instead. And what may be more surprising is that the voters who say they’ll support the NDP don’t seem to be reluctant, mournful or hamstrung about it.

The Liberals used to complain about national-unity crises and the rise of Quebec separatism while using them—in 1968, 1980 and 1993— to win power. Today their brightest hope is for more “polarization along an outdated ideological spectrum” rather than the suffocating convergence that leaves the beleaguered party so little room to breathe.

But Coyne at least has the right instinct, the same one that made her briefly a figure of national attention during the Meech skirmishes of 1989 and 1990: she is willing to stand up for something she believes in. What she has in common with Shane Geschiere, David Merner and Jonathan Mousley, whoever the hell they are, is a refusal to let the Liberal Party go down without a fight.

They could use some company. The presence of Coyne and Justin Trudeau at leadership debates would be a little weird, but they’d get over it soon enough. Marc Garneau, the navy officer, engineer and astronaut, would be a formidable candidate. These relative heavyweights are in no hurry to commit, and they don’t need to hurry, because their party has set an insanely lackadaisical schedule for choosing its next leader. But in due time, potential leaders should not be shy about getting into the race. The Liberals are not doomed to disappear, but neither are they required by any law of the universe to keep thriving. It’s all up to the Liberals now.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/authors/paul-wells/why-no-one-is-in-a-hurry-to-lead-the-liberals/feed/46Is it time to gather round Trudeau?http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/time-to-gather-round/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/time-to-gather-round/#commentsMon, 25 Jun 2012 21:30:01 +0000John Geddeshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=269346The Liberal's star attraction has the name and the buzz. But who is in his inner circle?

When Justin Trudeau stood in front of a Liberal crowd in a Winnipeg restaurant and bar early this month, it was no surprise that he easily grabbed and held the room’s attention. After all, the approximately 150 party members and potential supporters at the Pony Corral, a dockside establishment on the Red River not far from the University of Manitoba, had turned out expressly to hear the Montreal MP with the famous last name who is arguably the Liberals’ sole star attraction these days. But Neil Johnston, the local party organizer behind the event, said if the way Trudeau went over with the partisan patrons was predictable, the impression he evidently made on servers and cooks was less expected. They stopped working to listen, too. “The kitchen staff, they were probably recent immigrants,” Johnston said, “and they were talking about it afterwards.”

The spread of Trudeau’s celebrity well beyond the desperate, diminished ranks of Liberal stalwarts is what makes him by far the party’s most closely watched personality as it slowly ramps up to choose a new leader. Interim leader Bob Rae’s decision not to try to win the job for real next spring has left the eldest son of the late Pierre Trudeau strikingly isolated as the only putative candidate capable of generating serious buzz. Still, even Liberals galvanized by the scion’s sizzle wonder if there’s enough substance beneath it. And that leaves party insiders unusually curious about exactly which veteran strategists might gather around Trudeau to lend their experience to his excitement—assuming he relents and reverses his stated position that as the 40-year-old father of two young children this is the wrong time for him to attempt the leadership leap.

So far there is no obvious Team Trudeau waiting in the wings. Among well-known Liberal organizers, Bruce Young, a Vancouver-based consultant with Earnscliffe Strategy Group and a veteran of many federal and B.C. Liberal campaigns, is one of the more outspoken Trudeau enthusiasts. Young, an aide to Paul Martin during his brief prime-ministership, got to know Trudeau when they were both working on Gerard Kennedy’s run for the Liberal leadership back in 2006, the race Stéphane Dion eventually won. “To be frank, my initial read on Justin Trudeau was that he was well-known and useful in politics because of who his father was,” Young said. “After spending actual time with him, I found out that he’s tough as nails, whip smart, and not to be underestimated.” As a B.C. Liberal, he emphasizes the fact that Trudeau spent several years studying at the University of British Columbia and then teaching high school in Vancouver.

From Trudeau’s vantage point, the possible field of candidates brings complex personal and political calculations into play. New Brunswick MP Dominic LeBlanc, an old family friend who is very close to Trudeau’s brother Alexandre, might run. If he doesn’t, some likely LeBlanc backers would be expected to switch to Trudeau. The link to Kennedy is perhaps even more intriguing to insiders. He lost his Toronto seat in the 2011 election to the NDP, but has not ruled out contesting the leadership again.

Among strategists and rank-and-file Liberals, there is overlap between potential support for Trudeau and Kennedy. (Trudeau was recently the marquee draw at a Liberal fundraiser Kennedy hosted in his former Toronto riding.) The two men were introduced years ago by Gerald Butts, former principal secretary to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and now president and CEO of the environmental group WWF-Canada. Liberals who know them both say Butts and Kennedy are good friends. However, Butts has been close to Trudeau since they met as McGill University students—and is widely assumed to be a key private source of advice on his next move.

It’s not likely Trudeau will make that move until he mulls over his options this summer. The party’s leadership vote is slated for April next year. Voting will be open not only to card-carrying Liberals but also to a new category of registered supporters. That’s a huge change from the former system, in which delegates cast ballots at a final convention. Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison said the new rules mean candidates can afford to wait longer to jump in. “In the past,” Brison said, “a latecomer would be at a significant disadvantage because all the potential delegates would be sewed up.” The new voting rules open the possibility of a late charge by a contender able to sign up many members and supporters, perhaps mainly through social media, rather than by relying on organizers working in the trenches across the country.

When it comes to social-media impact, Trudeau has few rivals in Ottawa. He boasts nearly 140,000 Twitter followers, compared to fewer than 6,000 for fellow Montreal MP Marc Garneau, for instance, and under 5,000 for Kennedy. Of course, an online following shouldn’t be a substitute for a compelling, serious message. What Trudeau’s might be, though, remains largely undefined. He’s associated more with style than substance. His official role in the House, Johnston noted, is as Liberal caucus critic for post-secondary education, youth and amateur sport. “It’s not,” he said, “economics or foreign policy.” If indeed Trudeau bows to growing pressure and runs for leader, the first challenge facing the team he will need to assemble is to fill in those nagging doubts.

A few thoughts on Bob Rae’s decision to forego the Liberal leadership race.

First, that cloud of dust you see is the Conservative Party of Canada tumbling forward to the ground. They’ll get up and regroup of course. They have a lot of money and a five-year winning streak. But they spent millions of dollars in 2012 running Bob Rae down. And now for their efforts they are left with Tom Mulcair’s NDP at a new durable plateau of popularity; serious trouble in a Quebec that will have 78 seats at the next election; and Not Bob Rae. Attack-ad money down the drain.

Second, Rae’s decision probably improves the Liberals’ chance of success. As Jordan Owens wrote here over the weekend, Rae has already shown much of what he can do as Liberal leader. Leading a third party is always hard for anyone, especially when you’re the first Liberal to do it, but Rae has been unable to craft a coherent Liberal message that went beyond middle-roadism. Some of that would have changed if Rae had become for-real full-time leader, but style is style: he has always preferred to improvise. In 2006 he ran for the leadership, in a party to which he had never belonged before, on his record, rather than on a specific program. So the Rae we’ve seen, winging it sometimes quite well but winging it all the same, would have been the one who continued to lead.

Third, the party’s predicament is partly down to poor design. That it still has no clear idea who will lead it, 13 months after its election defeat, is not ideal. It needed to settle its leadership question earlier, and it still needs to settle it soon. The national executive should seek to accelerate the leadership selection process, even if it means forcing perpetual touring-company Hamlets like David McGuinty to finally make a decision.

Who should run? Now is not a great time for Liberals to wait until next time. There is no guaranteed next time. The medium-term likelihood of the Liberal party’s survival is an open question. Anything could happen. But if the Liberals lose as many more seats in 2015 as in 2006, 2008 and 2011, there won’t be much left to lead. So everybody get into the pool. Marc Garneau has an astonishing record of success in many fields, and he has improved as a political performer. His chippy, cheerfully confrontational manner is often quite appealing. McGuinty needs to stop waiting for people to ask him, because it won’t happen, and get in the game. Former candidates like Martha Hall Findlay and Gerard Kennedy may want to tempt fate again. There’s room for surprise candidates. I like David Bronconnier, the former mayor of Calgary, but I offer his name only as an illustration of the idea that “somebody you weren’t even thinking of” might turn out to be the best candidate. I assume Bronconnier hasn’t the faintest interest in the job.

Justin Trudeau? We’ve come so far in the five weeks since we ran my article about the kid that I have already handed in my Trudeau Exploratory Committee membership card. He will make his own decision. If he runs he will have a formidable head start, as indeed he did, in some ways, on the day he was born.

Finally, the Liberal party will cement its reputation as the party of denial if it does not have at least one candidate advocating formal cooperation or merger with the NDP. Nathan Cullen, who played that role in the NDP race, won 24.6% of support on the third ballot. A recent poll suggests the notion is popular among both parties’ electorates. The Liberals are welcome to plug their ears and sing nah-nah-nah, but until they can demonstrate they have something to say to the Canadian people, the question of their party’s relationship with the NDP will remain in the air. Hint: insisting you’re against cooperation with the NDP until a month after the election is probably the wrong way to do it. Just ask Stéphane Dion.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-liberals-after-rae/feed/33Justin Trudeau should be the next leader of the Liberal Party. No, seriously.http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/justin-trudeau-should-be-the-next-leader-of-the-liberal-party-no-seriously/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/justin-trudeau-should-be-the-next-leader-of-the-liberal-party-no-seriously/#commentsFri, 04 May 2012 15:08:01 +0000Paul Wellshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=256407If this guy’s name was Joe Smith, the notion that Liberals might turn to him would be a no-brainer

The only time Justin Trudeau had for an interview on a recent Thursday was over breakfast at his Ottawa hotel. Under his suit jacket, the sleeve buttons on his dress shirt were undone. His necktie was knotted, but left loose over an open top button. His mane of black hair was tousled. Even in genteel disarray, even dressed more or less like a couple hundred of his parliamentary colleagues, the 40-year-old Liberal MP for the Montreal riding of Papineau looked like a million bucks.

I showed up late, slumped into a seat, ordered an omelette. I’ve known Trudeau for nine years, never well. Trudeau wondered why I’d convened this little meeting. “Your first note to me said you’d need three minutes to chat. Now it’s breakfast and your photo department is calling my office looking to take pictures. What’s up?”

There was no point beating around the bush. It’s not as though he hadn’t heard the question before.

“We’re preparing two stories. John Geddes is going to do a reported piece on the current state of the Liberal party. And I’m gonna write a piece wondering why Justin Trudeau isn’t running for the Liberal leadership.”

Trudeau’s eyes rolled and he half-smiled—here we go again. And then his face changed. He stared past the tabletop into the middle distance. His expression darkened. He looked stricken.

“Nobody knows better than I do what the pressures of party leadership can do to a young family,” he said. “It tore mine apart.”

He wasn’t yet six years old when his father and mother separated in 1977. Sacha was just short of four, Michel less than two.

Today Justin Trudeau and his wife, broadcaster Sophie Grégoire, have two children, Xavier, five, and Ella-Grace, three. As it stands, Trudeau’s career has him travelling often to raise money for his beleaguered party. He was in Kingston, Ont., the night before I met him. But at least now he gets to spend weekends in Montreal.

“I want to spend more time with my family” is, of course, the classic exit line for men and women who need to escape a career in politics. Coming from Trudeau, it sounds more definitive than that. “Just the investment in time . . . ” he said, his voice trailing off.

So it’s definitive then? Well, never say never. As he discusses the challenge facing any Liberal leader over the next few years—“Bob Rae or anyone else”—Trudeau becomes progressively more animated. For a guy who was raised at 24 Sussex Dr., he turns out to be surprisingly attracted to a fixer-upper.

Sure, for three [UPDATE: two, actually. Sorry about that — pw] elections in a row, in 2006, 2008 and 2011, the Liberals have broken their previous record for lowest-ever share of the popular vote. Sure, they’ve never had fewer MPs than the 34 who limped away from the debacle last May 2. (They’re up to 35 since Lise St-Denis defected from the NDP four months ago.) “All the reasons people give me why I shouldn’t be leader”—the long odds, the shattered aura of inevitability, the pressure from Conservatives and New Democrats consciously executing a squeeze play against the Liberals from either side—“those are the very reasons that make the whole idea tremendously exciting to me.”

And on top of everything else, there’s the tantalizing prospect of a chance to do something even his father never accomplished, if only because nobody in his father’s generation ever had to.

“Whatever else he did, Pierre Trudeau was not a re-inventor of the Liberal Party.”

So will he run? Not now. Probably not soon. But maybe not never. In the meantime perhaps some of you are wondering whether I’ve lost my mind for even raising the notion that Justin Trudeau could be cut out for something more than late-night talk radio. Isn’t he just a clothes horse? A legacy pledge?

And yet. Take the name out of things for a second. If this guy’s name was Joe Smith, the notion that Liberals might turn to him would be a no-brainer. He has won and won again in a riding the Bloc Québécois used to hold, in a province where the Liberals have been picked apart by the Bloc and then the NDP. He is effortlessly bilingual. When he stands in a room, conversation stops. In a party whose woes include a punishing inability to raise money commensurate with the challenges it faces, he is a fundraising machine.

As for the name, it binds Trudeau inextricably to an enduringly popular aspect of the Liberal legacy that Stephen Harper and Thomas Mulcair, for their own reasons, won’t touch with a barge pole: the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

“People still think there’s sort of a debate around the Charter that politicos go into,” Trudeau said. “And I get wrapped up in it too from time to time. ‘Oh, Justin’s trying to defend his father’s legacy.’ The debate is done on the Charter. It defines Canadians. It defines Canada. People, even in Quebec, are 88 per cent supportive of the Charter, even if they get reminded every now and then, ‘We were left out of the Constitution!’ ” (The number comes from a CROP poll last autumn for Idée Fédérale, a Quebec federalist group.)

As Trudeau’s entire brief career has demonstrated—he was elected for the first time in 2008—everything about him, from his name to his grin, irritates a lot of people. As he has also shown again and again, those people are outnumbered by others who rather like him.

Since our breakfast was turning into a string of blunt questions, I gave him another. Is Justin Trudeau cut out for serious work?

“Listen. There are two groups of people out there. People who know me and who’ve worked with me and people who haven’t. That’s the only distinction that matters. What did people say when I said I would run for a hotly contested nomination in Papineau? ‘Ridiculous. He’ll never win.’

“And then against Vivian Barbot,” the popular Bloc incumbent? “ ‘Are you kidding? It’s impossible. He’s totally full of himself and delusional. He’ll never win.’

“Even in this silly boxing match, people said, ‘He’s so out of his depth, it’s ridiculous. He doesn’t even know what he’s doing.’ Somehow I keep being strangely lucky.”

The silly boxing match, of course, was his nationally televised charity fight against Patrick Brazeau, a young Conservative senator built like a brick wall. Brazeau came at Trudeau determined to take him apart. He left with a bloody nose after Trudeau won a TKO in the third round.

“He hit me with an abandon and a strength in those first moments that honestly I hadn’t felt before. It wasn’t painful. It was just surprising and disconcerting. I was like, ‘Okay. This is not the way it was supposed to go.’ And that was the only moment where I sort of went, ‘Okay. This might not have been as good idea as I thought it was.’ And then as soon as it started it stopped. Suddenly my counters were landing and he was sort of empty.”

And there were still two rounds left to fight. Trudeau’s height and reach advantage did the rest.

The only lesson from all of this for Trudeau’s political future, perhaps, is that he had trained for precisely this sort of confrontation, and that he had taken pains to ensure his confidence was earned. In Montreal he sparred with experienced boxers who were built like Brazeau, small and hard-packed. When Sophie started to think this was a bad idea, he invited her to come watch him prepare.

“My wife couldn’t get past the size of his arms, and just what a scary mofo he was. And that generally delighted me. But I told Sophie, ‘Look, come in and watch me train one time. I’ll take on someone who has the exact same build as Pat, a little more boxing experience, and I’ll show you that I can hold my own.’ No problem. So she eventually came around to trusting me on this.”

Brazeau went away disappointed. So, Trudeau thinks, did some of his own friends. “I think a lot of people close to me figured it was good because it would be a little lesson in humility for me.” No such luck.

But it isn’t aerobic endurance that Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff were lacking when they went to the electoral mat in 2008 and 2011. It’s as though recent Liberal leaders have lost the key that used to unlock the Canadian electorate for generations of Liberal leaders. The current Liberal caucus, led for the moment by Bob Rae, seems barely coherent. Eleven of its MPs are from Ontario, 12 from the four Atlantic provinces. The party’s electorates in its last two strongholds have almost nothing to say to each other. Perhaps the Liberals have noticed this. The Conservatives sure have. The party is essentially defined at one end by the pieties of Cabbagetown sophisticates, at the other by the teetering economics of seasonal employment insurance.

“And a few anglos in Montreal who have no other choice,” Trudeau said with a smirk, extending the harsh analysis before his tone changed and he set about refuting it. “No. There’s more to the Liberal electorate than that, obviously. In our last election we got over 2½ million people across the country to vote for us. But where you fall into the trap of trying to identify the electorate is, if we were to start to focus that way, we’re already beaten.”

The Harper Conservatives are masters at identifying highly motivated slices of the electorate and appealing to them, Trudeau said. “And the choice the NDP made in Thomas Mulcair, while a smart choice in terms of getting someone who can be a counterweight to Stephen Harper, exacerbates that.”

For the Liberals to start sifting for their own highly motivated micro-electorates would be a mug’s game, Trudeau argues. “As I know from 30 years of fighting against sovereignists in Quebec, if you allow them to set the terms of the debate, you’ve already lost. And if the debate becomes about who can better identify the niche groups that are going to vote for you, the Conservatives have us beat. There’s no question about it. They have the information, they have the data, they have the capacity, they have the targeting, they have the networks, they have power. So they can do it.”

The alternative is to appeal to people across their narrow concerns. Trudeau claims to see, in last month’s surprise victory of Alison Redford’s arch-moderate Progressive Conservatives over Danielle Smith’s conservative Wildrose Alliance, the possibility that such an approach could work. “What we saw with the Alberta election is, mainstream Canadians, to use an imperfect word, are deeply worried. They woke up in Alberta. And that’s all it was. People woke up and said, ‘We’re not the lake-of-fire rednecks that people are painting us to be.’ Albertans are not that. Same people who voted for Naheed Nenshi,” the similarly none-too-conservative mayor of Calgary. “That was not an accident. Alberta has got, just like everyone, a tremendously strong set of ideas and values about Canadian diversity and Canadian strength. And the mainstream is just waiting to be not polarized and not made cynical.”

This may sound naive. It probably sounds naive. Trudeau hurried to sound less naive. “Any politician who’s going to overcome that cynicism has a huge job. I used to say in the last election that before we can convince Canadians that we have the best platform, we have to re-convince Canadians that politics should be in the business of shaping the future of Canada. And we didn’t get the first part done. People don’t believe that any politician is any different from any other one.”

So how, precisely, would a weakened and internally incoherent Liberal party do better next time? “My sense is that leaders will not be able to do it alone. It has to be led from a movement, a team that involves more than just the leader. A lot of strong voices that remove the emphasis a little bit on leader.”

So it would involve the Hypothetical Nameless Future Liberal Leader, with Justin Trudeau at his or her side? “Yes. I plan on being extremely visible in the next few years. But almost in a way of de-emphasizing that focus on leadership that we have.”

So the rail-thin, lion-maned clothes horse with dimples like moon craters, a giant-killing right hook and a weapons-grade surname will position himself as the loyal helpmate of a post-leadership-fixation Liberal Party? It’s so crazy it just might work.

“One of the things I said publicly when we first appointed Bob Rae to be interim leader and people said, ‘Oh, do you think he’s going to stick to it?’—I said it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. If we don’t have a leadership candidate who can hold Bob to his promise, or defeat Bob, then we need Bob to be the leader. It’s a self-regulating system.”

By the same logic, of course, if Bob Rae isn’t cut out to be the leader, and it really is a self-regulating system, somebody else should move into the slot. Justin Trudeau is three years younger than Stephen Harper was when Harper became leader of the Canadian Alliance. But he won’t entertain the possibility that his time is near.

What does Sophie think of all this? “She is my toughest critic, no doubt. She holds me in check and keeps me grounded, every step of the way. Pretty much whenever I make the newspapers or I’m trending, and people across the capital are rolling their eyes, saying ‘What did Justin Trudeau do now?’ you know I’m getting an earful from my wife, who is inevitably upset. Or concerned.”

People used to say she should be the one in politics, not him. “She is in politics. She really dislikes politics. Intensely. Her sense of service is as finely tuned as mine is, in the sense of giving to this country and this world that has given so much to us. But most days she’d rather I was running an NGO than sitting in this House. I have to keep telling her and reminding her—and reminding myself—that the biggest NGO, pick whichever one you want, is still at the mercy and whim of sovereign governments and parliaments.”

So the most prominent Liberal in the country remains an admirer of governments’ ability to get things done. His faith in the ability of the Canadian people to rise above difference, to perceive and work toward an agreed-upon notion of the common good, remains. He’s fascinated by the challenges his party faces. He’s genetically connected to the last distinct brand advantage his party has, the Charter of Rights. And he’s shown a knack for surprising victories against long odds.

There’s an obvious solution to all this. But Justin Trudeau says it’s not his time. Yet.

Mike Crawley, the new president of the Liberal Party of Canada, may be a youthful 43, but he boasts a surprisingly long history of stepping up when the party finds itself in dire circumstances. A few months after then-leader John Turner led the Liberals to a soul-sapping defeat against Brian Mulroney’s ascendant Conservatives in the 1984 election, Crawley opted to join the losing side. Growing up in an Ottawa family that didn’t care much about politics, he was nonetheless a teenaged true believer. “My first event was a hoity-toity fundraising reception that I got a free ticket to,” he remembers. “I showed up, didn’t know anybody—a geeky 15-year-old with all these people in nice suits. Even though I was just 15, I thought I could have some influence, and that attracted me.”

Since Liberals elected him to head their national board of directors at a convention early this year, Crawley has taken on a behind-the-scenes rebuilding challenge even more daunting than what confronted his elders in the party back in the dark days of the mid-1980s. Turner had at least clung to official Opposition status. But in the May 2, 2011, election, Michael Ignatieff led the Liberals to a third-place humbling, as the NDP vaulted over them to become the government-in-waiting. A party laid so low normally looks to a leader for direction. But the Liberals put off picking Ignatieff’s permanent successor until spring 2013. That left Crawley and his board to map out two or three years of painful recuperation. His diagnosis of the Liberal malaise is blunt enough to come from a disdainful Tory or New Democrat. “The root of the party’s problem,” he told Maclean’s, “is that it’s gradually become more and more closed both to new people and new ideas.”

In fact, critics have long slammed the federal Liberals as a closed club. In the past, however, that club always offered the cachet of power, or close proximity to it. Losing three elections in a row under three leaders—Paul Martin, Stéphane Dion and Ignatieff—wiped out any aura of exclusivity. So now the Liberals are trying to reconnect even with sympathetic Canadians too wary to sign a membership card. As of this week, the party began inviting mere “supporters” to register, just by entering their names and email addresses on the Liberal website. No initiation fee is charged.

The new not-quite-Grits will get to vote for the next leader, but not nominate local candidates for MP, participate fully at the riding association level, or vote at policy conventions. Crawley optimistically predicts “hundreds of thousands” of supporters will eventually enlist, compared to the current 40,000 to 60,000 full-fledged members. The inspiration for the move originates partly with France’s historically cliquish Socialists, who gave themselves a populist boost last year by opening their presidential nomination contest to voting by non-members.

Liberals hotly debated the proposal to create and empower the new supporter class in January at their convention in Ottawa. Those who argued for the innovation predicted big things. “It will make the Liberal party the most open in Canada,” said Nova Scotia MP Scott Brison, “changing the party from a club to a modern political movement.” Even if the supporter category proves that potent, though, the Liberals still need not just tentative backers, but regular cash contributors. The Conservative party’s fearsome machine—producer of waves of blisteringly negative advertising—is fuelled by a massive fundraising advantage. Figures for the first three months of 2012, released this week, show the Tories raised more than $5 million from 36,269 individuals, while the Liberals pulled in $2.4 million from 22,870 donors.

But that’s not as bad for Liberals as it might look to outsiders. The party’s fundraising gathered steam during Ignatieff’s losing campaign last spring and stayed relatively healthy, measured by recent standards, even after the dismal election result. It raised $10.3 million in 2011, far back of the Conservatives’ $23 million, but well ahead of the NDP’s $7.5 million. Compare that to the measly $5.9 million the Liberals raised in 2008, their previous losing election year. It seems 2011’s near-death experience jolted at least some Liberals and their sympathizers into finally donating, whereas the 2008 loss inspired mostly apathy.

Still, top Liberal strategists admit privately that the current pace of fundraising isn’t enough to both run the party properly between campaigns and fill the $25-million war chest needed to fight the next election, expected in 2015. As well, the party is soliciting earmarked donations expressly to pay for TV ads they plan to air to define their new leader next year—and counter the anticipated onslaught of Tory attack ads, like those that convinced many unsure voters Dion was “not a leader” and Ignatieff an expat carpetbagger who “didn’t come back for you.”

Choosing that next leader is of course a prime preoccupation of many Liberals. After last year’s election, the party decided to put off the selection until 2013. Bob Rae, the veteran Toronto MP who was once Ontario’s NDP premier, took on the job of interim leader—after vowing not to run for the permanent position. Rae, now 63, said last year that “it’s important for the party to look very much to a new generation of leadership.” More recently, though, he’s suggested that only strictures set down by the national executive—not his own pledge—prevent him from throwing his hat in the ring.

Crawley says the executive will clarify its stance within weeks. Most Liberal insiders expect them to declare Rae free to run if he first steps down from the interim leadership.

“The whole objective is that by the beginning of summer there will be clarity in terms of the rules for the leadership, candidate eligibility, all of those matters,” Crawley said. Another senior Liberal official, who asked not to be named, said the party’s aim is to make sure if Rae decides to change his mind and run, “it won’t be messy or dramatic.”

There can be no separating the chances of a Liberal revival from the leadership question. In Stephen Harper, they face a proven winner who, at only 53, could easily lead his Tories into two more campaigns. Thomas Mulcair, 57, chosen by the NDP earlier this year to succeed the late Jack Layton, is looking like a formidably disciplined rival. But no clear field of would-be Liberal leaders is forming. Liberal MPs who might apply to fill the vacancy—like New Brunswick’s Dominic LeBlanc, Quebec’s Marc Garneau, Ontario’s David McGuinty and B.C.’s Joyce Murray—remain tentative. Only Justin Trudeau, who has seemed to rule out a run, rivals Rae for generating interest.

Until the leadership race takes off, Crawley’s methodical overhaul of the party’s unwieldy apparatus will remain the main action in the Liberal camp. Recently, his board took what could be watershed steps to catch up to the more streamlined Tory and NDP operations. The Liberals’ provincial and territorial wings, and the party’s branches devoted to seniors, youth, Aboriginals and women, will no longer be guaranteed a slice of party revenues. Instead, according to Crawley, from now on they will have to submit annual plans and ask for funding from national headquarters. “The Liberal party has developed over the years into a bit of a beast with a lot of subgroups within it who go off on their own and follow their own agenda,” Crawley says, asserting those days are over.

No matter how efficient the party becomes, it’s the message, not management style, that matters to voters. Many Liberals argue that Rae’s bravura debating skills have won them a higher profile than their third-place standing in the House would normally allow. If that’s so, however, it’s not reflected in polls released since Mulcair won the NDP leadership in March. At least three put the NDP nearly tied with Harper’s Conservatives with between 30 and 35 per cent support, with the Liberals trailing by about 10 points. Crawley waves off Ottawa’s inveterate obsession with horse-race numbers. “In terms of over the next 12 to 18 months,” he says, “being obsessed with every poll, that’s a mug’s game.”

Instead, Crawley and other senior Liberals are focused on finding new policies to pitch, ideas that would give them the potential—under the right leader—to ride an updraft during a campaign. The problem is that the party has recently tried bold and basic platforms—and failed miserably with both. Dion’s daring “Green Shift” would have taxed fossil fuels to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with offsetting cuts to personal and corporate taxes. Voters didn’t buy the concept. Ignatieff’s more modest five-point “Family Pack” tried to outdo Harper at offering easy-to-understand niche programs, from help for families paying for college or university, to tax breaks for energy-saving home renovations. Again, no sale on election day.

Burned twice by such different platforms, many Liberals are taking their time about dreaming up the next one. Perhaps inevitably, some of the early discussion is over which way to lean—left to rebuff the rising NDP, or right to challenge the governing Tories. Some Liberals argue they must avoid the temptation to frame their choice in those terms. “It would be a mistake to try to emulate the NDP economic policy, in the same way it would be a mistake to emulate the Conservative social policy,” Brison says.

But the classic Liberal centre-straddling approach carries the risk that the party can end up looking bland or blurry. The examples of other developed nations—including the U.S. and Britain, France and Australia—show how democratic politics can tend to resolve itself into a two-party, left-right choice. Canada was long the exception, with the Liberals staking out the enviable middle ground between choices further toward either end of the ideological spectrum.

It’s not just MPs and Crawley’s crew who are arguing over repositioning the party. Liberals report grassroots debate sparked by last year’s brush with annihilation. Katie Telford, a former senior federal party strategist now pitching in as a volunteer Toronto riding president, says the grim post-election mood has gradually given way to hashing out new ideas at surprisingly well-attended local Liberal meetings. “The reason people keep coming is because they want to be part of the solution,” Telford says.

Back in the early sixties—in the wake of John Diefenbaker’s massive majority win for the Tories in 1958 and the creation of the social-democratic NDP in 1961—some also predicted the Liberals would be squeezed out as a polarized party system took hold. Instead, Lester Pearson led the Liberals back to power in 1963, ushering in an era of innovation, including universal health care and the public pension system, and paving the way for Pierre Trudeau’s long run in office.

Crawley points to the new ideas of the 1960s, rather than the internal party restructuring that followed Turner’s 1984 defeat, as the template for what must happen over the next three years. “The Liberal party has to figure out what its agenda is going to be, not just for the next election, but for the next 10, 15 years,” he says.

But evidence of ideas that ambitious being hatched is hard to find. Asked for examples, Crawley points to how 77 per cent of delegates to the Liberal convention in January voted to legalize and regulate marijuana. The next leader won’t be bound to put that into an election platform, but the membership’s will was clear. Of course, not all prominent Liberals put the emphasis on the contentious drug policy issue. Ottawa MP McGuinty, for instance, calls for a plan to improve private sector pensions, especially as resentment of public sector retirement packages mounts, along with restoring the traditional Liberal focus on health care. Former MP Gerard Kennedy, who lost his Toronto seat to the NDP last year, calls for a policy thrust to counter the income inequality that inspired last year’s Occupy movement.

Yet the marijuana issue competes for attention in Liberal circles with more mainstream policy preoccupations. Vancouver MP Joyce Murray says the party plans to consult widely on legalizing pot, and touts the push as the clearest sign of Liberal willingness to engage in risky policy debate. And she notes that Mulcair quickly ruled out any similar interest on behalf of the NDP. “We know the war on drugs doesn’t work. That’s clear. Who has the courage to tackle this problem? The Liberal Party of Canada,” Murray says. “That’s the Liberal heritage. When you do something that’s brave and radical, 30 years later it’s the fabric of Canada.”

That three-decade time frame is much on Liberal minds, after they celebrated the 30th anniversary on April 17 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Former prime minister Jean Chrétien was on hand with Rae for a Liberal rally marking the occasion in Toronto. Both Harper and Mulcair, citing Pierre Trudeau’s 1982 constitutional reforms as divisive in Quebec, passed on toasting the Charter. So it was a chance for Liberals to remind themselves of how their history in power sets them apart, before they returned to the mostly grinding work of trying to make sure, after a punishing series of setbacks, that power might still have a place in their future.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-liberal-crisis/feed/11The Liberals: Smartest party in the universehttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-liberals-smartest-party-in-the-universe/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/the-liberals-smartest-party-in-the-universe/#commentsSat, 14 Apr 2012 03:14:58 +0000Paul Wellshttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=252529“You trying to get me to spend money?” a senior official in the Liberal party said to me this afternoon.
“Huh?”
“Your tweet. Cheeky.”
The fog cleared a bit. Ah.…

The fog cleared a bit. Ah. I had indeed written something on Twitter about how, weeks after the Conservatives had started running ads attacking Bob Rae’s record as Ontario premier, the NDP had managed to produce ads promoting their own leader, while the Liberals still hadn’t made a move.

So is that going to change?

“Ain’t gonna happen,” Senior Official in the Liberal Party said.

The Liberals, then, will forego “spending money” to defend their leader, or to share their opinion of the Conservative Prime Minister. Thrifty! They saved money when Stéphane Dion was leader, and they saved money when Michael Ignatieff was leader, and they are going to go right on saving money. Let the Conservatives and NDP “spend money”; the Liberals will be content with 19% in the polls, and full wallets. Thrifty!

Other Liberals have explained their thinking. Bob Rae is, after all, the interim leader of the Liberals. The party can’t “spend money” defending him because the party hasn’t selected him as leader. Besides, why spend Liberal money today to defend what an NDP premier was doing in the early 1990s?

And as long as the Liberals pick another leader to lead them into the next election, then this will all have been devilishly clever of them, because the Conservatives will have spent a mint to discredit a guy who won’t even be around when the votes get cast. Of course nothing will stop the Conservatives from buying another wave of ads against whover the next leader is, but in the meantime? Clever.

Unless Rae does stick around to lead the Liberals into elections in three years. Making him the third Liberal leader in a row to take an airwave whupping, unanswered, will then look less clever.

The Liberals’ problem, of course, is that none of this is a choice, it’s a consequence of choices. Because they’ve decided to take a very long time to pick a leader; and they’ve selected an interim leader with considerable political baggage and uncertain plans for his own future; and because the question of his future plans is highly divisive among Liberals; the whole thing is a nest of tension that can’t be reconciled. Why on earth wouldn’t the Conservatives lob a stink bomb into the middle of that nest?

The Liberals remain a year away from being able to do what, say, Tom Mulcair can do any day at will. Or a shorter distance from rewriting the rules they made a show of writing right after last year’s elections. Meanwhile, they twist.

If you enjoy seeing somebody injure themselves trying to occupy two positions at once, have a look at Josée Legault. The Montreal Gazette columnist and former PQ strategist was largely responsible for viralizing Justin Trudeau’s weekend remarks on separatism; transcribing his remarks on her blog, she accurately noted how unthinkable Trudeau’s position would have been to his late father, and how surprising they were coming from any Liberal. Yet when the story blew up in English Canada a couple days later, Legault took umbrage. Those hysterical Anglos had distorted the story.

Mardi matin, l’histoire s’était rendue jusque dans les médias canadiens-anglais. [Tuesday morning, the story made it into the English-Canadian media.] Mais de manière plutôt déformée, voire caricaturée. [But in a rather deformed, even caricatured manner.]

D’où les hauts cris poussés à Ottawa et à travers le Canada à l’effet que le fils de Pierre Trudeau, tout à coup, serait tenté de devenir, un jour, qui sait, un méchant «séparatiste»… [Hence the outcry in Ottawa and across Canada to the effect that the son of Pierre Trudeau, all of a sudden, could be tempted to become, one day, who knows, a naughty “separatist”...]

Legault goes on to gripe about the “honesty” of this characterization. In fact, it is perfectly honest and in perfect concord with what Trudeau said, and Legault was correct to recognize it as news in the first place, even if she does not now like the result (perhaps because she has lost ownership of the scoop).

Justin Trudeau did say he was willing to contemplate separation under real-world circumstances. “One day, who knows?” is more or less exactly what he told the interviewer. This is a legitimate surprise. And while I believe that a forty-year-old man is entitled to his own opinions—not that any Quebecois baby boomer can stand to think of Justin as a person entering the era of back pain and prostate problems—the contrast with his father’s extreme anti-sovereigntist position really is worth remarking upon, if only because Justin’s surname is the source of much of his influence.

The news that Trudeau is like most other Quebecers in regarding separation as a negotiating position, to be adopted or discarded according to circumstances, really is arriving suddenly. Moreover, Trudeau’s conditional advocacy of separation really is in strong contrast to the Liberal party’s stance. Problematically so, one would think.

In contemplating Justin Trudeau’s inherent predicament, my attitude flips back and forth from contempt to sympathy, almost from second to second. He is at best an intellectual middleweight, and often speaks nonsense when he steers into deep political waters. But he seems to be somewhat aware of this, so much so that he seems a little frightened of being promoted beyond his capacities as a consequence of his DNA. He has repeatedly disavowed any intention of seeking the leadership of his party. He seems to sincerely prefer family life and tending to his pet issues. He has an ideology, but he doesn’t have a grand structured vision for the country. (Obviously!) He may be just about the only member of Canada’s parliament who doesn’t secretly harbour a perverted, narcissistic dream of being Prime Minister. Just yesterday he noted that “[My father] was an intellectual; me, I’m a bit less intellectual.” Why is it that Canada cannot take the poor man at his word?

And yet, as sane and worthy of imitation as he seems in these respects, does anybody recognize the “Canada of Stephen Harper” Trudeau ranted against so excitingly today in front of a scrum in Centre Block? Harper’s party has not only accepted the legal fact of same-sex marriage, but has promised to shore it up against the disrepair in which the prior Liberal regime left it. The pro-life agitators in the Conservative caucus are a few barely-detectable grains of pepper amidst a kilogram of salt; on the whole, they are little more numerous and noisy than the pro-lifers in the pre-2011 Liberal caucus (who were, in one of history’s petty ironies, disproportionately victims of Conservative gains in non-metro Ontario).

As a fairly radical social liberal, I am strongly in favour of vigilance against backbench-led attacks on reproductive rights and gay marriage. (As someone once said, the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.) But let’s be realistic. Justin Trudeau, when he is finished speaking for the “millions” of Canadians who supposedly don’t recognize Stephen Harper’s Canada, may like to know that there are millions more outside Quebec who think like me and who (unlike me) voted Conservative anyway. These people are potential Liberal voters—indeed, the most important, hypothetically attainable ones. Trudeau’s sci-fi invective against the imagined Conservatives of Counter-Earth does not seem like the smartest way of winning the real ones over.

Which is another reason Bob Rae might not be terribly pleased with Trudeau’s theatrics. (“C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute.”) Rae’s statement that Trudeau “will always be” a “strong believer in a united Canada” stands in direct, genuine contradiction to the remarks Trudeau made in his radio interview, and Trudeau hasn’t retracted those remarks, either: all he has really done is to bitch about the attention being paid to them. Oddly, even though it is almost universally agreed that Rae will soon drop the “interim” tag from his leadership like a trapped newt shedding its tail, nobody seems to think that this potential conflict is the essence of the story. It’s Justin vs. Pierre, as opposed to Trudeau vs. Rae, or, indeed, Trudeau vs. the deepest, most implacable traditions and beliefs of his chosen political party.

Those in the business of turning politics into drama instinctively prefer to concentrate on the atavistic spectacle of father vs. son, even when the father is long gone. This won’t change in Justin Trudeau’s lifetime, or in the lifetime of our civilization, so if he sounded somewhat berserk yesterday, the man (and he is a man, for God’s sake) does have his reasons.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/authors/colby-cosh/justin-trudeau-reflections-on-a-grown-man/feed/109The Liberals await heaven’s commandhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/awaiting-heavens-command/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/awaiting-heavens-command/#commentsMon, 23 Jan 2012 14:00:01 +0000macleans.cahttp://www2.macleans.ca/2012/01/26/awaiting-heavens-command/Peter C. Newman on how the convention revealed a party still searching for a way back from the brink

It was like spending a frigid weekend huddled around the world’s biggest samovar, with 3,200-plus joyful Liberals, not one of them fitting my expectation that they had shifted categories from walking wounded to being the walking dead. Their joy is that, whatever else they might do in a future that remains a distant and ill-defined option, at least they can pretend that dreams still count. That even if the Earth moved last May 2, and left the one-time power barons barren of power, they exist, awaiting heaven’s command.

Assembled, they project the distinct impression that while they are in third—which is like having a one-way ticket to purgatory—they should still be heard. No longer members of Canada’s natural governing party, they are losers searching for a mission. Slip-sliding away, like drunks convinced they are holding up the lampposts. The Grits have yet to earn another chance to head an effective opposition. Beyond that, they can’t count on Bob Rae being the dream candidate who could lead them back to the Treasury benches. He has enough political baggage to fill an airport carousel. For some inexplicable reason, he reminds me of Sir John A. Macdonald’s line, “I do not say that all Grits are horse thieves. But I feel quite sure that all horse thieves are Grits.”

Before they’re taken seriously again, the Grits must correct a potentially fatal absence. The Ottawa delegates scored high on youth (a third were under 25) and gender (half were women) but dismally failed the skin-colour test. Swaths of white stands out in our multi-hued society. Also, the delegates’ decision to legalize marijuana hands Stephen Harper the most effective of cheap shots: I can visualize future Tory ads entirely devoted to attacking the “Marijuana Party.” The up-and-coming generation may swallow that Kool-Aid but parents and grandparents vote, too.

The Liberals’ electoral reforms are daring and dangerous. By allowing anyone to vote on policies and leadership, they leave themselves open to being hijacked. That’s not just a theory. Way back during my youth, the University of Toronto campus included a Communist party. This was at the height of the Cold War, and its membership was not composed of radical Canadian kids but Moscow-directed apparatchiks. A few of us who came from countries then occupied by the Russians—which fit my Czech family background—quietly joined the Communist club, and spread the word. By the time its annual meeting came around, we had a slim majority. We immediately moved a successful motion that the organization immediately be dissolved, and its treasury donated to the Red Cross. It passed without debate.

It did and can happen.

The convention established the fact that this is a new political party. The stars who dominated the Trudeau party were made prominent by their absence. From those glory days, only John Turner, Dick O’Hagan, Jim Coutts and Don Johnston attended.

An interesting convention victory was that of Mike Crawley to succeed Alfred Apps as party president. His opponent was the effervescent Sheila Copps, who assured the assembly that her tennis arm and sex life were flourishing. She was a great politician and Paul Martin was just plain dumb to squeeze her out during his brief tumble as prime minister. But she does evoke the old Liberal party, and this convention turned out to be a cleansing exercise. Sadly, she was not wanted on the party’s next voyage.

Crawley will be a mixed blessing. He was dead right in his declaration that Liberals must get over themselves and forget the notion that there will always be a clearly defined spot for them in Canada’s political firmament: “We have to realize,” he told the delegates, “that every vote we earn in the next election will come from the work we do from this day forward.” True enough. The downside of the Crawley candidacy is that he remains a controversial figure in Ontario’s rural politics because it is his company that is planting wind farms across the province, often in the face of local anger.

What the Liberal party needs, following the free-fall electoral record of Michael Ignatieff, is a leader with a swordsman’s eye for being alert to the counter-thrusts of his opponents—plus the tactical intuitions of a chess master. Such a superior creature has yet to appear on the Liberal horizon.

The election of Thomas Mulcair as leader of the NDP in March could dash Liberal hopes of reconstruction, according to Liberal militants anonymously quoted by Montreal’s daily La Presse on Tuesday. The comments echo the words of Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae, who had already said in November that the outcome of the NDP leadership race would have serious consequences on the other parties. Mulcair, the MP for Outrement, Que., is perceived in the NDP as the natural Quebec candidate, where the party pulled off its victorious Orange Crush in the last federal election. The Liberals fear he would know best how the NDP might keep the 59 seats it gained in La Belle Province, writes La Presse.

Each morning, the Liberal party’s press office issues a notice to journalists, describing the day’s events. Today’s closing act, it says, is a “Speech by Liberal Leader Bob Rae.”

Among his audience, there are those who think that his job title is missing a word. You won’t find it on the Liberal website, either. “Interim” has been trimmed. But despite his best efforts, when Rae speaks today, those three little syllables will be on every delegate’s mind.

By refusing to confirm or deny his own ambitions, the interim leader has put himself—and his party—in an unenviable position. If he pulls his punches this morning, he’ll disappoint delegates who flew across the country for a partisan pep rally. But if he hits it out of the park, he’ll face renewed calls for clarity about his own intentions: why would he be doing such a good job as interim leader if he didn’t want to keep the job? It’s a ludicrous question, of course, but it’s Rae’s dilemma, distilled: as far as many Liberals are concerned, he’s stuck between a big black block and a leadership race.

Rae faces an impossible balancing act between caretaker and cheerleader. Under the circumstances, he’s done a remarkable job, and I doubt you’ll find a delegate who’ll disagree. But his interim success is beginning to backfire; every news story about the Liberal party is now a will-he-or-won’t-he story about Bob Rae. In political Ottawa, Liberal leadership drama, however speculative, pushes everything else off the page—except, perhaps, marijuana.

Some reports have suggested that Rae is barred by the rules from running. That’s not true. The only thing holding him back is his word—the promise he made to the party when he sought the interim leadership. No interim leader has gone after the permanent job after saying he wouldn’t since 1919, when interim leader Daniel Duncan McKenzie did an about-face and decided to challenge William Lyon Mackenzie King and two other candidates for the leadership. He came fourth.

Rae didn’t need to take the interim job. After a remarkable career, and at the age of 63, he could hardly be blamed for staying out of the trenches. Instead, he staked his reputation on becoming “Bob the Rebuilder,” and his ambition was selfless: to leave the Liberals in better shape than he found them. To his credit, this weekend’s amendments to the party constitution are a step in that direction.

But rebuilding requires more than structural change. Without a wide-open, fair, competitive leadership contest, Liberals will miss a crucial opportunity to clarify the party’s vision for the country. A competitive leadership contest requires competitive candidates, and recruiting those candidates—persuading them to pass up other opportunities for the chance to lead a third-place party—is part of the interim leader’s job. That job becomes impossible if the caretaker becomes the frontrunner.

An interim leader who runs to replace himself benefits from his own incumbency. In Rae’s case, that means two years of publicity, press releases, cross-country travel, and staff, all at the party’s—and the public’s—expense. Other potential leadership candidates won’t just be disadvantaged or deterred; their own membership dues will have paid for their opponent’s campaign. The party, meanwhile, will lose out on the kind of leadership contest that its future success requires.

Last election, as the results rolled in, some pundits prophesized that the Liberals’ third-place finish meant that the party would soon struggle to attract the attention of the media. Wishful thinking. In the next three years, Liberals will either write one of the greatest stories of survival in Canadian political history, or else end up in in its scrap heap. If we live, someone will write a book about it. If we don’t, Peter C. Newman already has. In the meantime, the last eight months have taught us that, no matter how few seats the party holds, the political press still can’t resist a good Liberal process story.

That’s a serious problem for the party—it can’t communicate effectively when its machinations swallow its message. Today, as Bob Rae takes the stage to close this convention, his own indecision will obscure his party’s success. Until he makes up his mind, he’ll be feeding the beast with the Liberals’ own entrails.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/rae-party-of-one/feed/6Leave Peter C. Newman alone!http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/leave-peter-c-newman-alone/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/leave-peter-c-newman-alone/#commentsSun, 15 Jan 2012 04:05:45 +0000Adam Goldenberghttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=233884“There’s a guy out there peddling a book talking about the death of the Liberal Party of Canada,” mused Michael Ignatieff yesterday. “What is he talking about?”
It was another…

“There’s a guy out there peddling a book talking about the death of the Liberal Party of Canada,” mused Michael Ignatieff yesterday. “What is he talking about?”

It was another easy standing ovation at Peter C. Newman’s expense. Amid the heady hoopla of this convention, the octogenarian author of When the Gods Changed: The Death of Liberal Canada has been second only to Stephen Harper as an object of derision and ridicule. Don’t pity the man; scorn sells books.

Listening to some of the speeches this weekend, you’d think that this whole Liberal get-together was all an elaborate attempt to rebut Newman’s argument that the party is on its deathbed. If that’s the case, then it’s a waste of time—not because Newman is right, but because this weekend can’t possibly prove him wrong.

Yes, the Ottawa Convention Centre is packed with happy Liberals. Yes, this is Canada’s biggest political gathering since last May’s election. Yes, this is the first Liberal conference in memory not to be sullied by leadership intrigue. All of this proves that the Liberal party has not yet perished. It does not prove that it won’t.

Everyone here—every delegate, every journalist, every defeated candidate, every former leader, every MP—has their own account of how the Liberals ended up in third place. Mine goes something like this: we didn’t get enough votes. The reasons abound, but none of them made a bigger difference than the whims of individual voters. Remember, you don’t need vast amounts of money or organization to win 59 seats in Quebec.

By the next election, this weekend’s proceedings will have long been eclipsed by a leadership race, an election campaign, and three years of happenstance. The Death of Liberal Canada will sound as scandalous as The Secret Mulroney Tapes, or even Renegade in Power, which I can only assume was a racy name for a book in 1963.

Newman’s latest has a saucy title, but it offers prognosis, not diagnosis. No amount of argument can disprove a prediction. In the meantime, insisting that the party is still kicking only comes off as defensive.

The first thing Michael Ignatieff noticed were my sneakers: black Converse All-Stars. “You’ve got your running shoes on!” he said, ushering us into his Ottawa hotel room. In the dying days of the spring campaign, he had stumped through southwestern Ontario in a bright red pair of the same, sprinting to shore up Liberal votes in ridings the party once took for granted. We lost all but one of them on Election Day.

That was eight months ago. Today, Ignatieff is a recovering politician with unrequited dreams. “I didn’t get there,” he told delegates last night. “God knows I tried. I didn’t leave anything on the table. I gave it everything I had. But I didn’t get there.”

This morning, he spoke with Anonymous Liberal Sources about the journey.

AG: Anyone who watched last night saw you showered with affection and respect. How did that feel?

MI: It was very touching. I was a little apprehensive coming in, there’s no question about that. I didn’t know what people would feel. Two things struck me. First of all, there were an awful lot of young people in the room for whom this was their first political convention. I must have met 20, 30 young people, some students, some not students, and some not so young, for whom this was their first convention. That’s a very good sign. We’re not preaching to the converted. We’re not preaching to the choir. So that was great. And there was something in people’s eyes last night that struck me very much, a kind of hopefulness. I mean, everybody knows where we are, everybody knows we’ve got a mountain to climb, but we seem to be at the base of the mountain, ready to climb. It felt good. They were incredibly nice to me, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that this is a team that wants to win.

AG: Is that different from the way you felt before May 2nd?

MI: Well, I think now we absolutely know we have to get our act together.

AG: Are you saying there’s a greater sense of urgency now than there was before May?

MI: I think there’s a lack of complacency. I think everybody knows the future of the party is at stake. It’s not an institution whose future can be taken for granted. It has to be rebuilt, it has to be renewed—and those words, “rebuilding” and “renewal,” have content; that is, there are changes to the constitution, there are fundraising changes, there’s recruitment of new candidates.

Most of all, I think one of the great unspoken assets of the Liberal party of Canada is Stephen Harper. The country deserves better than this prime minister. We’re not in a kind of slushy middle here; this is the most conservative government the country’s probably ever seen, and we’ve got to offer Canadians something better.

AG: Doesn’t that also cut the other way, though—as the party renews, it renews in opposition to something, as opposed to in proposition of something?

MI: Oh, sure. You can’t get back to power by defining your project in negative terms. But it helps to have somebody in office who represents the opposite of what you believe. The politics of personal destruction, the politics of division, the politics of fear, it’s all there. It helps you to define the politics of moderation—the politics of democratic respect, the politics of hope—more clearly.

Last night, when Dalton McGuinty just said one sentence, “let’s build schools, not prisons”—it’s code for so much more than that. It’s a rallying cry. Everybody knows there are two ways to go here. So that’s why I’m saying Mr. Harper is an asset. It’ll help us concentrate our message, but it’ll have to be positive.

That means clean energy. That means a politics of democratic renewal within the party and in the country. And equal opportunity—I just can’t get out of my mind the number of Canadians I met who are having a tough time. The kid in a Manitoba school telling me he didn’t know if he was even going to graduate high school, because he didn’t have a place he could do homework, he wasn’t sure if the streets were safe enough for him to get home safely at night. This is our country.

We can’t afford to waste people. We can’t afford to have people think the game is over before it’s begun. We’ve got to be saying to the Canadian people: you can’t tax cut your way to a productive 21st-century economy. You can talk that talk, but it’s not going to give you a productive 21st-century economy, because it will scythe apart the public goods that make prosperity possible. That’s what we’ve got to say, and so we shall. It’s going to take a while, and we can do it.

AG: Do you feel a sense of unfinished business?

MI: Oh, sure. Enormous, enormous amounts of unfinished business.

AG: How do you convert that into your own relationship with the politics of the country?

MI: What I said last night: you’re never really out of politics. If you’re a citizen, if you’re a teacher, if you’re a writer—I wrote a piece on fairness 10 days ago, I keep writing, keep banging away. I’m very struck by what you can do in a classroom. I’ve got 200 students. You don’t do partisan politics in a classroom, that’s not appropriate. But you want to give them a strong sense that these are the issues that matter.

We’ll have a class on inequality. We’ll look at the numbers. We’ll run through. No kid graduating in a political science class in this country should not understand what’s happened to income inequality since the 1970s, period. And then, what do we do about it? It’s the biggest problem out there, in all western liberal societies. But yeah, of course there’s unfinished business.

AG: I’m reminded of your 2006 leadership platform, where there was a commitment to certain aspects of national citizenship education, which was controversial at the time. I wonder how the scholarship that’s been endowed in your name fits into that idea of education as a means of social construction.

MI: Well, I think this a great idea. There are a lot of—and people forget this about the party—there are a lot of young Canadians who want to be politically active at their college or their university who can’t go to the party convention, who can’t take part in politics, because they’re holding down a job to pay their tuition. These are kids who want to do public service, who want to get involved politically, but their financial situation is precarious. So here’s some fellowships that just toss some change on the table and say, “we’ll take care of that.” Go and take part in an election campaign. Go to that convention. Your public service matters. And we’ll pay the bill. That’s something small but concrete we can do make sure that we get more 18 year olds and 19 year olds thinking, “yeah, my education’s not just about me getting a personal qualification, it’s also about taking part, participating.”

AG: If that’s the objective, then why limit it to Young Liberals?

MI: I can imagine getting a bright young person who has progressive ideals—someone, for example, who’s very concerned about the environment—not necessarily party-affiliated, who’d make a good candidate. But it won’t be for me to decide; it’ll be for the people who administer the trust. But I think it would be great to have someone who didn’t have a party affiliation, but was clearly associated with public service of some kind.

JO: Thinking back to our time on the Hill and some of the things that people said, and the ways that people conducted themselves, it can be difficult to reconcile that what happens in Ottawa is necessarily a public service.

MI: Tell me about it.

JO: Who should we be looking for in the next generation of politicians? And if the nastiness of politics is turning people off, where do we go from here?

MI: Let’s start by saying that public service does not necessarily mean service in the House of Commons, and public service is not synonymous with partisan political activity. It comes in a thousand colours, but the common denominator is: it’s not about me—it’s about we. That’s what you’re looking for in a kid, someone who thinks, “my purposes are connected to serving someone else’s purposes, somehow.”

Now, we’re not all boy scouts. People do this for highly ambitious and personal reasons, and that’s fine. But what somebody said last night is also true of a political party—that there are all kinds of different forms of public service, but there’s no form of public service that can make more difference for more people than partisan political activity. You get into government, you can change the life chances of millions of people. So it’s not as if partisan public service and being elected as an MP is the only way to do it, but boy, it’s the way to have the biggest possible impact, no question.

But the party’s got to understand—and Mike Crawley said this last night—the party’s got to see itself as being one public service organization in a very competitive field, all of whom are competing for the allegiance and commitment and brains of the next generation. They’ve got to be big enough to reach out to those groups and say “come on in.” We have no monopoly on public service, we have no monopoly on virtue, and we have no monopoly on wisdom. If you know something more about how to get people to change their environmental practices, or improve their educational outcomes—I met with Marc [Chalifoux, a former aide] last week and we were talking with people at Ryerson who are the best in the country at getting kids to finish high school and go to college. That’s my cause. Of all the causes that I care about, that’s the one, right there.

AG: You spoke positively about the proposals for constitutional reform that are on the floor. Which of them do you think are the most important? The primaries proposal, the proposed changes to the policy process—which of these changes do you think would have a lasting impact on the party’s fortunes?

MI: I don’t want to duck that question, but I want to come back to what I said: what really matters is getting new people in. The constitutional changes matter, but the thing that the party mustn’t do is turn in on itself and think the thing we’ve got to do is fix our plumbing. The thing we’ve got to do is get new people in.

JO: There’s a lot of focus after the last election on places that we lost. But what about places where we haven’t been—

MI: Ever?

JO: Exactly. What can we do to reach out to the western Liberals and rural folks?

MI: God knows we tried, from the moment I came into politics. Inequality is not just an issue between individuals, between classes, between regions. It’s between urban and rural. One of the biggest divides in our country—I said it in 2006, and I said it right through my political career—is urban-rural. Lots of parts of this country feel entirely left behind. And they’re mobilized by, you know, the gun control issue.

What we’ve got to mobilize them with is: we don’t want any part of this country left behind. I used to give speeches on and on and on about the fact that we don’t want to have a country where you think, “my kids have got to move to the city if they’re going to have any kind of future.” We’ve been saying that, and we’ve not got through. The Conservatives hold these places because they keep bombarding rural Canada with, “Liberals are a bunch of urban, metropolitan snobs who don’t care about you and want to leave you dead by the roadside.” We’ve simply got to go out and say, “they’re lying to you about us. We actually care about you more than the other guys, and we’re not going to pander to your prejudices—we’re going to give hope to your kids.”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/michael-ignatieffs-unfinished-business/feed/5As the Liberal party turnshttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/as-the-liberal-party-turns/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/as-the-liberal-party-turns/#commentsMon, 09 Jan 2012 21:39:16 +0000Aaron Wherryhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=232547On his way out, soon-to-be-former Liberal party president Alf Apps apparently posits that Bob Rae could run for the party leadership.
Eight months ago, Mr. Rae may have promised to…

On his way out, soon-to-be-former Liberal party president Alf Apps apparently posits that Bob Rae could run for the party leadership.

Eight months ago, Mr. Rae may have promised to not do so. Last week, Mr. Rae may have left open the possibility. Last November, as previously noted, he seemed to completely dismiss the idea.

As for Rae’s part in becoming the new leader now that Michael Ignatieff has stepped down? “It won’t be me,” he said, to which the atmosphere in the room became heavy. “I’m not going to run for leadership.”

Anyway. Mr. Apps throws out three precedents for the current Liberal predicament—their electoral defeats in 1930, 1958 and 1984. Each time, the Liberal party rebounded (eventually) to win government. But those defeats also probably underline just how far the Liberal party has fallen and how much further it has to go this time.

A quick comparison:

1930. The Liberals won 36.7% of the seats, 45.5% of the popular vote and finished second.1958. The Liberals won 18.1% of the seats, 33.4% of the popular vote and finished second.1984. The Liberals won 14.8% of the seats, 28.0% of the popular vote and finished second.2011. The Liberals won 11.0% of the seats, 18.9% of the popular vote and finished third.

Anyone out there remember the Liberal Party of Canada? Governed our country for the better part of the 20th century. Produced five leaders who each ruled the land for at least eight years. Briefly tried to convince us that John Manley had charisma. Is any of this ringing a bell?

What some of you may not know is that the Liberal party still exists. It’s true! In fact, by one measure the Liberals currently rank second of the three major federal parties. (That measure? Alphabetical order.)

The buzzword among party members these days is renewal. This month Liberals will gather in Ottawa for the party’s biennial convention (“biennial” from the Latin meaning “no longer able to afford an open bar”). At the convention, Liberals will try to demonstrate they are a relevant 21st-century political force by refusing to accredit bloggers and likely choosing old-guard stalwart and human klaxon Sheila Copps to be party president. EVERYONE CLEAR THE TRACKS FOR THE RENEWAL TRAIN!

Okay, so maybe Liberals aren’t that great at rebuilding. But they are trying, and the results are adorable.

First the party tried to land 5,000 new members or membership renewals. In a written appeal, the national membership secretary said that when supporters ask him why it’s the right time to join, he always responds: “If not me, who? If not now, when?” I think we can all agree this is a pretty terrible answer. It contains zero reasons to sign up and two questions that can be parried with the replies “Maybe that dude over there” and “Never.”

More recently, the party unveiled what interim leader Bob Rae insisted would be a “game-changing” initiative: the Million Conversations Campaign.

During this fundraising effort, the party asked supporters to fork over $1 million—with Rae claiming that “every dollar you donate will help us start one more conversation with a Canadian about the issues they care about.”

It wasn’t made clear how the math of a dollar per conversation would work. Are they going to be held by pay phone? Will certain Canadians be paid the minimum wage to listen politely? (A buck? You’ve got my attention for six minutes. Go.)

What matters most is that Rae launched the campaign with possibly my favourite line ever from a political fundraising appeal: “That’s why, as winter falls, and the shimmering holiday lights remind us of the values we cherish, I’m calling on all Liberals . . . ”

So poetic! Surely no one among us hasn’t sat back, gazed upon the shimmering lights on the Christmas tree and immediately thought to themselves: free health care and equality of opportunity for Aboriginals.

But forget about the timeless Liberal value of household electrical outlets—what about all those chit-chats? “As national director of the Liberal Party of Canada, it’s going to be my job to turn a million dollars into a million conversations,” Ian McKay wrote to party members. “Politics isn’t rocket science. It’s about people talking to people.”

Actually, politics is about cutthroat tactics, relentless message control and making Andrew Coyne get all tut-tutty on Twitter about your MPs’ juvenile antics—but the point remains: the Liberals really want to talk to Canadians about . . . something.

“Think for a minute about the awesome power of one million constructive conversations,” MP Ralph Goodale wrote to supporters. Think about it. Consider it. LET IT MARINATE IN YOUR BRAIN JUICES, CANADA.

Personally, I might have considered donating to the Million Conversations Campaign if I could have had input into the subjects of the conversations.

Dear Liberal party: here is $5. Please conduct conversations with five Canadians on the following topics:

—the third season of Dukes of Hazzard

—thickest moustaches of the Yukon

—the efficacy of quantitative easing in a time of economic stagnation

—yellow

—are you going to finish that sandwich?

In the end, Liberals raised enough money to hold 1,004,750 “conversations.” This prompted Bob Rae to dispatch a triumphant missive: “I asked you for a holiday miracle and you made it happen.”

You heard him right, folks. Getting people to donate money to the Liberal Party of Canada now qualifies as a holiday miracle. The game has truly been changed.